Hmmm... I, too, as you might have guessed, am also rather fond of speculative fiction and fantasy, especially the latter. I would say that TSOI definitely has the power to grab and hold a reader with any appreciation for this kind of story, and many with no appreciation for either genre. There are passages in TSOI that are achingly beautiful and make me cry when I read them, and there are other parts that make me laugh aloud still, even after editing them.
But, for me, the most important thing about TSOI is what I call the distillation: If you strip away the details and boil the story down to