I don't feel like a lot happened with this novella--it just seemed like a whole lot of set up for the following stories. The timeline spans 35 years but aside from some interesting worldbuilding, most of it revolving around how gender is handled, there wasn't much going on. The ending seemed rather anti-climactic and I'm undecided on whether or not I'll continue.

Despite the strong ending, this book ended up being less than I had hoped for. Simply put, it's a spectacular victim of overhype. The first half of the book is terribly slow, with almost nothing of real interest happening. The second half was much better and I originally gave this book a 4 star rating because of it. Now that I've had a little space from it, my thoughts and feelings on this book have definitely settled to a 3 star. The abundance of the snark and biting dialog between Harrow and Gideon have soured and the lack of worldbuilding and character development have left me feeling rather meh about the whole thing. Not sure if I'll read the next book, although Harrow is a far more interesting character than Gideon so maybe.

Gonna be honest, I'm finding all the complaints about this book being too SJW, particularly compared to Fifth Season, and all other comparisons between the two books a bit ludicrous. The two books are completely different (most obviously, one is high fantasy while the other is urban fantasy/sci-fi), which is made clear in the summary provided by the publisher. Why would anyone expect them to have the same tone or deal with issues like race and prejudice in the same way? Honestly, I get the feeling that everyone enjoyed the Fifth Season (which was set in a completely fictional world and thus had parallels to our real world issues but framed differently) and how it handled race because it was easy to ignore and didn't make people feel uncomfortable.