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I was expecting...something different. I knew from the cover description that this would not be an in-depth treatise, but I was still surprised at just how superficial most of the discussion in this book was. Just when I'd think the author was gearing up to dig into something juicy or interesting - nope! Chapter's over.

And some of the chapters just seemed kind of pointless. The entirety of the two pages on Danish could be summed up as, "Danish used to be spoken over a very large area. Then there were some wars and that area shrank. Then there were some other conflicts and it shrank again. Now its area is much smaller." ...okay? Cool? That really could have been explained in a short paragraph, and the rest of the chapter dedicated to discussion of the actual language.

The places where a lot of detail was given were often the ones I felt needed it least, e.g. over-long lists of word forms to illustrate a relatively minor point. I particularly noticed this in the chapter on Welsh, but it happened elsewhere, too.

I'm no professional linguist - my knowledge is mostly from two very basic linguistics classes I had in college - but I was still kind of disappointed. I didn't hate this, but it wasn't what I was hoping for.