My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sheepfarmer's Daughter follows Paks as she runs away from home to join a mercenary company and learns how to fight and take on more responsibilities as a soldier. This first book in the trilogy follows her through 6 months of training and the first two years of campaigns, and it is very heavily focused on camp life, and details that would be important to a simple soldier.
The author takes the viewpoint of Paks very literally - we learn what she is learning as she is learning it. As her understanding of her world broadens, so do her observations of it, and our picture begins to open up. As a result, our view of the rest of the world starts out very limited. This is very well done, but at times is also frustrating - I want to know what's going on! But I decided to sit back and take in the smaller picture for a while. It's quite a difference from most fantasy that I read, which is usually more on the epic scale right from the start. The main focus here is on one military company and specifically on one person's experience within that.
At times it did drag a little, and it was so detailed that I wondered if it was really going anywhere or if it was just reveling in the moment. But just when I was starting to get bored with the details, things picked up. For the most part I enjoyed the very detailed accounts and the slow development of Paks' experience and confidence as a soldier. There was not much magic until closer to the end, and that would normally bother me. But as the approach is to let us discover the world as Paks discovers it, I found I unexpectedly enjoyed the fresh outlook. The extra details of a larger world and magic that started to creep in towards the end were tantalizing, and I am looking forward to the next book, where I believe the view should widen significantly.
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