I absolutely loved this book.

I had done some research before picking this up and knew that it was going to be right up my street and boy was I right!

The first thing I found was that I immediately feel completely in love with this world. This grimey, old city filled with water. It’s just such a unique and interesting setting for a fantasy story and the way Lynch weaves this extremely intricate world together in little bits and pieces is so beautiful.

The little schemes and tricks and lies are all very clever and believable. The characters are endearing (I have a soft spot for a loveable rogue) and I’m looking forward to seeing them grow and develop in the next books.

My one criticism would be the need to have the “interludes” (flashbacks) in every chapter. The early ones were great for building up more of the world and characters and they formed their own nice little side story alongside the main narrative. However, I found that as the story progressed, the main story started to build tension and had a really nice momentum going and then it would be interrupted by these little bits of history and seemingly irrelevant backstories. Now, a lot of these do pay off in the end but I found the placement of a lot of them to be quite jarring in the placement of the story.

Nevertheless, I loved this and I’m so excited to start the second one tomorrow!