This book kept not being the book I expected it to be. It has, apparently, been a long time since I read sweeping epic fantasy and I'd forgotten its tendency to wander through settings and the world as the story of the hero tells itself as needed. It was a bit jarring at first, until I gave up trying to pigeonhole it.
And then I realized what was throwing me off--I haven't read enough MASSIVE EPIC FANTASY where the hero is a girl. I'd learned to expect that stories with women as leads were...two inches of ivory kinds of stories. To see an author remind us that women deserve epics as well is wonderful.
It helps that the book itself, for all its wild shifting, is a good book. The world Elliott creates is fascinating; I keep wanting to pull apart all the references even though my educational background has only given me access to some. And, as I may have mentioned once or a hundred times, thoughtful world-building is one of those things that drags me into a book immediately.
In terms of character, for all that Cat feels innovative, as a female epic heroine given an epic world to work in (Robin McKinley's Damar books have epic heroines, but the books themselves are not epics, or I don't read them as such. They're a kind of fairy tale.), she still has a few of the traditional male hero's annoying traits--the je ne sais quoi that makes me want to punch them in the face at least twice in the course of the book for being...it's usually stubborn or stupid. But I take that as a given of the genre and, in some ways, it's a mark of Elliott's success.
And we need more writers like her.