I got this book from a friend after trying (and failing) repeatedly to read a different historical novel in Catalan that was just too awful to bear. This one is much, much better: good characters, bad guys are less moustache-twirling villains than they are products of the times and motivations of their class. It avoids the twin traps of exposition and cliché that plague much historical fiction. And the real-life story it's based on is genuinely interesting.
So why only three stars? Because this book, like so much medieval historical fiction, seems to find it necessary to reduce women to sex objects and to have at least one caricatured gay man. WHY?!? Seriously; I would lose myself in the story for chapters on end, and then, all of a sudden, I'm yanked out of it by this stuff. And here's the thing: it's utterly unnecessary to the story.
So: I'll be reading the next one in the series, hoping for more of what I genuinely liked and less of the problematic bits.