I'm reading Tad Williams's Shadowmarch series - I'm currently in the second book out of four. They're entertaining, but they're not Williams's best work by any means. Like all his other series, it's written with several different viewpoint characters that alternate between chapters, but almost all of those characters are annoying, with the two main characters being twin teenage heirs to the throne - the princess at least is somewhat sympathetic especially once the first book ends, but her brother is all "depressed teenager" and his character ark just makes it worse. The main problem for the series is that the characters are all very one-note - with nearly no exceptions, each of them has exactly one defining personality trait, and it remains constant. Maybe this will change further into the series, but so far very few people have done anything that was in any way unexpected after first meeting them.
It's not a bad read by any means, but I can see why it really suffered for coming out the same time as the Song of Ice and Fire sequence - I haven't read Martin's series yet, but if even half of what I heard about it is true, this definitely pales in comparison (still, it's better than later Wheel of Time, and far less depressing that anything by Joe Abercrombe).
