There seem to me to have been some extraordinary storytelling choices made with this book. Sideline the hero of the previous volume, have him absent for nearly a third of the book, tell the entire story from the perspective of a young priestess raised to worship dark and terrible powers in a warlike expanding empire. It's as if the sequel to Star Wars had been told from the point of view of a trainee Sith and Luke Skywalker turned up just after having his hand chopped off, an invalid in an Imperial prison. And yet it is a beautiful book about learning that the things you have believed and taken for granted all your life are far narrower, more constrained and fundamentally strange, if not downright bad, than you could have imagined, and that your life in devotion to this thing, which you never had any choice about anyway, has been wasted. Haunting and written with an attention to craft and detail that makes the heart ache and the mind snap to attention, this is one of the great novels about breaking free.