I've just finished the recently published Tolkien work, The Children of Hurin. While I admire The Lord of the Rings, I am not a fan of its writing style, which I find unnecessarily cumbersome. This new book, constructed from previously published works by Tolkien's son, is presented in the same style. While it is the story of Turin and, to a lesser extent, Nienor, the children of Hurin and Morwen, it is clearly more about Middle-Earth and the construction of its legends.

None of which is to say that I didn't enjoy the story. I did. It felt like reading a historical biography, say of Arthur or Roland. The descriptions were thick, but I never felt the desire to skip over them to get to the story, as I do with many novels I read.

The only thing that really bothered me about the tale was the frequency with which people changed their names. I recognize that doing so is part of the Middle-Earth culture and I'm certainly supportive of the idea that identities are fluid, but the protagonist, Turin, goes by four or five names through the novel. At one point, in a passage that focused on Nienor, she meets up with him as Turambor and it didn't occur to me immediately that it was still Turin. (It didn't occur to her, either, as they'd never met before.)

The story itself is not long, and the novel includes some explanations of differences between this version and previously published parts of the tale as well as a discussion of the evolution of the tale in Tolkien's writings, beginning with a first incomplete version from the 1920s. I recommend it.