An average fantasy book all around. We have your dark outsider, your disguised royalty, your country bumpkin maturing into greatness, your forbidden magic saving the day, your evil and mysterious outlanders plotting the fall of civilization as we know it, your occasional lapses into horribly purple prose, and so on and so forth. By the end the plot gets a little contorted, what with characters suddenly warping between two major points of conflict and talking through psychic channels, which tore down the sense of isolation and urgency that one might expect in a book about a three pronged assault against a distant fortress at the edge of civilization. Inconsistencies like describing fire as the ultimate insult to the dead in one chapter and the ultimate honor in the next tend to pop up now an again as well.

While Lord of Cragsclaw is nothing special, it makes for a decent popcorn read, and its cast is sympathetic enough that I'll be spending a few hours to read the second book in the series. ( )