I enjoyed this book as a continuation of the elemental blessings series, but it didn't really stand out to me the way the previous ones did.
Partially, I found that Shinn seems to have less of a grasp on what constitutes Torz (or what makes Torz interesting) than she does for the other elements. So there wasn't that same sense of a character playing out her identity in the same fashion.
Partially, I thought Leah had it WAY too easy becoming a mother again. There's fantasy and then there's fantasy. Celia was a reasonably believable child. But Mally...it played into this fantasy of children as fulfilling for parents. Which, don't get me wrong, they absolutely are, but they are also people. Mally makes Leah feel better, never worse. She shows no resentment for her mother's absence, which is mind boggling. And I'm absolutely on board with Leah's behavior; she did everything right. But right actions still have consequences and I feel like we got none of those.
And then there's Chandran. Who I liked less and less as the book went on.

First there was the wife murder thing. And, like, I get it. She was evil. But in the larger context of literature, I feel like I read many more men whose murder of their wives is justified than women whose murder of their husbands for threatening them with violence is justified. Most women murdered by their husbands were just killed by evil men. And they get no vengeance. So fiction's constant reliance on the trope of justifying men murdering women, especially without the counter-narrative of women who are absolved and praised for rising up and killing their husbands, bothers me.
And secondly, Chandran has this annoying tendency to tell Leah what's good for her. And I understand his need to make his own choices, but that almost always shades into attempting to manage her emotions about it. Not cool, dude. So my investment in the narrative's extremely neat and tidy ending was rapidly dwindling.
If there's another book in this series, I'll probably track it down, but I won't be as excited for it as I was for this one.