I really wanted to like this book. I had heard a lot of good things about it and not very many bad things, so I'm still kind of wondering why I didn't like it. I think it's just becuase it was so slow through most of it. There is one characters who we see a lot of throughout the book and I think we would've been fine without him in the book at all. The plot things that he added could've been achieved another way and we could've saved all the pages of his storyline. I didn't even understand who all the characters were and what was happening for the first 150 pages, and usually I will DNF a book if I don't like it after 100 pages. I kept reading this one though because I was reading it for a challenge. So, I finished it. And I still didn't like it. I liked the storyline of Ead for the most part, and the romance was nice because it isn't something we see in a lot of fantasy books, however, those good points weren't enough to make me like this. The final battle when the dragons were actually ridden and used in combat was the best part, but up until then there were almost no dragons. This book was way more political intrigue and world building and LOTS of expository writing than what I want to read.