This book is a good end to the Drowned Empire trilogy, but longer than it needs to be.

There are large swaths of this book that were so boring, I almost gave up on it. The protagonists are just sailing from place to place, running into a villain, trying to talk it out with them, and then exchanging a few blows. And rinse, repeat for hundreds of pages.
At some point, Lin asks, "[Are] we truly negotiating in the middle of a battle?" And I'm like, EXACTLY, YOU GET IT! Because after many confrontations that were just people talking in circles, I was irritated with the pattern.

What truly delighted me with this book is that the magic/lore was deepened in surprising ways. There were some interesting plots twists that explained the mysteries in the magic, without feeling like cheap tricks. I think that fans of the magic system in these books will be delighted.

This novel does solid romantic relationships so well. There are stable couples in this book, simply loving each other with very little drama. It's somewhat refreshing after reading other novels with lots of drama in the romance.

The audiobook was great. There are different narrators for our POV characters, and they all do their performance well.

Thanks to Orbit and Netgalley for a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.