For a modern fantasy novel, this has a solid quantity of wierdness (oddity or fate, choose your meaning) not explained away into hex-paper boredom. I also liked the characters, except the ones no-one could like. And there is plenty of excitement and romance, not damaged by the foreshadowing granted by this being sort-of a telling of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, q.v.
The Táin itself is much much wierder. "His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek from the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. " Nor is that a monster - it's the handsome hero. Enormously high body-counts, lots of poetry, and women who do interesting things.
The modern novel sorts out a fair amount of the magic and religion into systems that make the duels-and-herding life less awful; there is a limit on population growth, many of the wounds taken in the constant battles can be healed immediately, the most important laws are enforced by the gods; or nearly everyone believes they will be, which is nearly as useful. Some books make this twee, as though heroism were imaginable but dirty hair weren't. Walton's builds a prelapsarian or Silver Age society, one in which the fates play with humans but without loading the dice first. (Her earlier books are later in the history of this world, and see its rules rearranged.)
How much magic (or indistinguishable technology) is needed to make a set of rules seem fair is a measure of something, the harshness of the rules, say. For instance, The Stone Canal handed just enormous capabilities to the system it described without convincing me that it would be a pleasant system for most of its inhabitants. ...I very faintly recall that someone in the 19th century wistfully wrote that if only food production could really keep up with population, the problems of the world would dwindle, since of course it does the rich no good to hoard more food than they can eat. (File that under: technical solutions do not suffice for social problems.)
ISBN: 0-765-30263-2
So wrote clew in
SF&F.