Hugo reading.
I feel slightly bad rating this above Middlegame because that was the more technically excellent book, but by the end, I was into this one more and annoyed I couldn’t stay awake to finish it and had to get through the last chapter or two first thing in the morning.
This book has two flaws. The first is pacing. Which is a time-honored debut author problem, but (as others have noted) the first quarter to third of the book just drags and it’s not fun to push forward. I also think Muir is doing something with language and speech patterns that doesn’t precisely land for me in the sense that it feels disjointed rather than a reflection of personalities, but so it goes.
The other thing, and this is probably specifically a Hugos issue, is that it’s a book about necromancy with nothing interesting to say about death - either how the characters relate to it differently or re/framing death for the reader in a way that does what literature can do. The necromancy is an aesthetic, which is fine, I had a secret desire to create a wardrobe out of hot topic too, but also why? Why does it MATTER?