The narrator horribly mangled the Afrikaans accent and sometimes had the Russian female character speaking in the same badly rendered Afrikaans accent before switching back to a mangled Russian accent. The narrator used a rather neutral expressionless tone, failing to convey the characters or their emotions. The author was good on Russia but terrible on South Africa and horsemanship, two main themes of the book. Sections where he described characters controlling horses or describing lives in South Africa were painfully ignorant and error-ridden. In all, this was a disappointing effort after the promising first novel Damascus Station.