Well, this was a disappointment—and I didn't even expect that much. I'm not even sure where to start off listing of the factors that made this so unenjoyable.

I guess the main problem for me was the pacing/structuring. There's a lot of stuff here that I expected to be fun, but the way it was delivered made having any sort of fun impossible. Both in terms of the romance and the external plot, most of the things that deserved to be dwelt on and digged in deeper ended up summarized at best. And it's not like there wasn't any room for those things, despite the small page count. Because plenty of space was wasted on repetitive pseudo-funny conversations and overall meandering. Also, the romance beats were just off in so many ways, and not in a "clever twist on the familiar structure while still keeping up with the genre cnventions" way at all.

The second big problem were the characters. I liked Lesto fine in the previous book, but as a POV character he didn't work for me. Part of it came from lots of telling/summarizing instead of showing, I'm sure. Part of it was just... how juvenile he was for a man in his early 40s? Honestly, just about everyone here acts like a dumb teenager. There are all those overaching mysteries and political plot threads going on, and the characters are primarily concerned with who fucked and/or punched whom. *facepalms* I just wanted to shake them all and make them pay attention to the actually interesting things going on. The most mature presence here was Allen, and he's the youngest person in the cast iirc. 

Really, all of this is a shame, because when I look back at the actual events of the book, a lot of them seem fun and interesting? But the way they were presented/laid out ruined them. Just goes to show that the shape of a book is no less important than the substance in many ways.

At the same time, I still enjoyed the worldbuilding with all these different languages and cultures, and there were hints of future plot threads that seem so intriguing—and so easy to ruin if handled with the same all-over-the-place approach. I guess because of those things, I'll tentatively commit to not giving up on the rest of the series. But I'm also not in any hurry to delve into the next book.