My Journey in Writing

I've given this book three stars because it held my interest enough to make me want to finish it but its lack of any major plot was a problem. It seems to be more intended as a commentary of life for a Viking who was a Christian than trying to follow any particular story, although there was one. It just didn't feel significant.
I also found it difficult to follow because of the similarities in many of the characters' names. I noticed that many of these are historical names so I understand why they were used but I feel it would have served the novel better to change some of them for the sake of clarity. We had Thorvild, Thorfinn and Thorstein, then also Halstein, and Snorri, who was Gudrid's (the female protagonist) son and Snorri, who was in love with Gudrid, even though she's already married. She's onto her third husband, actually, which also made it confusing when trying to become established in the novel, as two of them had similar names. It didn't help that her present husband, whose full name was Thorfinn Karlsefni, could be called Thorfinn, Finn or Karlsefni. Given that the novel had already demonstrated the similarities in names and that Gudrid was already three times married, at first it was difficult to tell if these were different men or the same one.
Another problem was the fact that much of the beginning of the novel is told as backstory. This can be tedious and it proved so in this case. And sometimes these things were mentioned in the middle of what were (I felt) more important plot themes, as could certain points of information. For example, we were in the middle of a plot development when Gudrid stopped to reflect on how comfortable her shoes were! There were a couple of things like that and I felt it would have kept the pace up if they had been removed.
In spite of this, as I said at the start, I wanted to see where it went and the resolution was okay, although there were plenty of loose ends as well.