This would have been a 5 star book for me if not for a few things. First, what I liked/appreciated: the writing itself was good, not baroque not too formal, it was well balanced. It was felt very knowledgeable and researched, particularly for battles, strategies, and things about ships, their navigation and operations, and the hazards that happen on a voyage. The worlds factions were interesting so I didn’t mind the epic fantasy hopping around all the time. There were some particularly great insights into characters that I found very poignant. The holy war that makes the overall zoomed out plot feel like it’s in motion did its job.

What I didn’t like, and some of this is might be somewhat spoilery: It feels like edgy dark fantasy in that the major blind side with books like this seem to always be women. They just aren’t well written, when touched on at all in this case. Literally every woman was raped. One of the characters only appeared in the fiction at all, at one point an entire chapter dedicated to her (and then never devoted to her again) about her being raped repeatedly, then appears later as a diversion to another character who’s made her into a concubine. Of the three women, all of them are sex objects and not empowered in any way whatsoever. This is the first book of five so it might be a setup for them to become empowered but no other character has to experience disempowerment like that, so who’s to say?

There’s some fairly heavy homophobia that’s not treated well and also used to disempower, which was annoying and tropey for a sea voyage.

The amount of granular detail devoted to some aspects will be great for some people but I’m not that into that for battles and what not. I did enjoy it for the voyage on the boat though. But generally, it’s not something I look for.