About five pages into this book I felt terribly confused, so did a little research and discovered that it's the penultimate tale in Piper's Paratime series of stories. Once I knew what the oft-mentioned "levels" were and a few other tidbits I began again and was a little more able to follow what was going on.

The premise as a whole was fairly interesting, but I found it hard to get that enthralled by the political intrigue having not read the other books in the series. The characters' names are all a little tough to remember, but there are only half a dozen that you really need to distinguish and they're all fairly easy to get to grips with, eventually. Methinks if I ever read the earlier books in this series I'll revisit this one and hopefully get a little more out of it. ( )

About five pages into this book I felt terribly confused, so did a little research and discovered that it's the penultimate tale in Piper's Paratime series of stories. Once I knew what the oft-mentioned "levels" were and a few other tidbits I began again and was a little more able to follow what was going on.

The premise as a whole was fairly interesting, but I found it hard to get that enthralled by the political intrigue having not read the other books in the series. The characters' names are all a little tough to remember, but there are only half a dozen that you really need to distinguish and they're all fairly easy to get to grips with, eventually. Methinks if I ever read the earlier books in this series I'll revisit this one and hopefully get a little more out of it. ( )

Stories of alternative histories by an early (and unsung) master of the genre.