This book starts off so incredibly slow for about the first 150 pages. If you make it through that, you'll find that the rest of the book picks up. I found myself struggling to read this in the beginning. It took me about a week just to get through the first 120 pages. But once I got through those, I finished up the rest of the 400+ pages in one day. I fell in love with Lazlo and Sarai and found myself despising Minya pretty quickly. There are a lot of descriptions that set up the book but I think it was necessary. The first bit of the book had me worried but I found myself enjoying the story the more that I read it.