Interesting world. Almost nothing is wasted in the fiction; set pieces, seemingly innocuous details, all play a part, which is always very satisfying for me. Everyone has character arcs. The fight sequences are fan-tastic.

My only gripes are personal and stylistic. The prose are economic and come off a little bit sterile sometimes and it is extremely hard for me to situate the place and time this takes in because it does much to avoid defaultism (to its credit). There is nothing really I know of to compare to and get an image of my head and the prose rarely concentrate on how cultural details look. I also just like text about food and clothing a lot, and this has some of that, mostly food, but it tends to never come back to what people look like and what articles of clothing look like.

Considering this is a fantasy world it’s hard to know what the ‘rules’ are. Is this present day but slightly bent? It doesn’t seem like anybody has smart phones but people are flying in planes and what not. So is this, like, 30-40 years ago? Again, what are people wearing then, right?the avoidance of defaultism has sort of created a bland palette where the world building that is done begs for more punctuation in this area.

Everything else felt pretty good. I dug the sort of godfather feel while clearly diverging from Godfather. Being subtle with subversion in a toxic male patriarchal environment. I really liked the villain, thought she was complex and interesting. Here for more of it.