A few of the things about this bug me enough that it was a pretty solid three if not for me making a pros and con list and being high off a decent ending, having just finished it.

Let’s start with what I did not like so I can end on a happy note:

First of all, the prose are fairly sterile and clinical, which seems to be the case across all his works. I’ve read this, The Last Empire, and both Skyward books and I have a feeling he keeps his vocabulary, sentence structure, and descriptions clipped in order to both limit page count (just imagine this with evocative prose, my god, it would be enormous) and to be accessible. Those are good reasons but it also means that the dialogue, plot, and “ideas” stand on their own. Buddy doesn’t even like a simile, typically. It makes parts where not much is happening, and not That Much does happen throughout the plot, more acutely slow because it always just a constant string of either dialogue or thoughts. I think he paces out world building exposition well this way, but the actual events, when you think about each persons’ story, feels really minimal.

Second of all, the pacing of each story felt really strange. For instance, one of the main characters story just like ends—somewhat on a cliffhanger, I guess?—until the veeeery end, and it’s specifically to do a little twist. And another character’s backstory is rationed out such that it really feels like mostly just his story, and that ends near the end of the book as well. Sometimes it works to string you along, a lot of the time it works against the overall cutting from character and scene.

This is also a pretty large sausage fest that super feels like it because it’s so, so long. Then one woman is just used for character development for a dude, and the other is in the book way less, and that bugged me because her story was pretty interesting. Would have liked for that to be paced out better.

I know people are like wow wow wow the stories all tie together but uhh yeah, I’ve read epic fantasy before... that’s what it’s supposed to do. If it hadn’t, I’d have thought I wandered into the wrong genre fiction. Also, this is a lot of setup and people seem to have given that a huge pass. Like, yeah, kind of the main plot threads are closed off? But those are very myopic and, again, when you think about the plot from each POV, not much happened, and that makes it feel more “basic”.

Now for what I like!
I really liked the magic system, the pacing of the world building such that it worked as a hook. I liked that doing “good” in a traditional sort of fantasy way, is predominate and played into a character consistently throughout. It feels like it’s a karmic infection that can catch in a more systemic way by way of the world building. There’s quite a lot I still don’t know, since this functionally setup and another hook. But Good and Evil and the moral fibre/chord of individuals seem to play into fabric of the world. So I dig that.

There is one character arc that is highly effective and another that sort of annunciates the other in a nice way. Much more nuance is integrated at the end. Really liked that (though the dialogue there was Wild). I liked how earnest they were and straight forward ways in which they communicated the most important aspects of themselves, and then those things were tested. Works for me.

I actually didn’t particularly think it was asking for a lot of act 1 faith in me. The POV switches did its work well there. Something happens each chapter. Sometimes it’s more words than need to be there to do it, because it’s dropping some knowledge, but I never felt like this chapter could just be deleted. They could be truncated I’m sure, but it kept me going.

I liked the very last chapter reveal quite a lot. The larger plot is more of a hook here, and it kind of has to be because of how this book is structured. I could see people just dipping right out if that hook wasn’t enough.

Overall, the absolute strength of this title for me is how interesting the setting is and this larger, meta plot rooted in history (and the hook at the very start of the book).