The story was quite fast paced and the sword fighting is described very well. However, the language is quite hard to understand at times because it includes lots of Scottish words and is old fashioned so you have to be prepared to slow down to work out the meaning of some sentences. You might give up on it very quickly if you are not a confident reader. In the edition that I read there were some useful pages at the end which told you about Scottish history to help you understand the story.