I really struggled with this book. It starts out fantastically, with a tragic backstory for the titular character Renia that feels grounded, character-focused, and intimate. It sets the stage for what I felt could have been a really strong character. Jump to the present day, and you have a setting where she is working as a scribe and a book goes missing, and the unique setup also felt like another compelling building block. That's where things started to go off the rails for me. The book introduces a ton of POVs, sometimes multiple within a chapter. Jumping perspectives within a chapter tends to frustrate me as it is hard to make the chapter feel cohesive, and that's certainly the case here. But even worse, I often found it confusing. The writing is not as precise and clear, often using a lot of pronouns despite shifting character POVs so often. You also get a weird mix of names. Some are overtly unimaginative such as Bob, Peter, Jeff, and then you have a bunch that feel more standard to fantasy like Renia and Sundance. It's not the most important thing, but it made it harder to focus because it really felt like I was constantly jumping in and out of different books. The biggest problem with this approach though is that Renia simply does not have a ton of screentime. We follow so many different characters that her storyline often feels neglected, and there are major developments in her arc that happen so suddenly that they felt like they had no weight to them. I also feel like her backstory and setup are neglected in favor of worldbuilding and plot, making me feel like she does not live up to her introduction in the slightest. By the end, I had lost all sight of her character. This is true of a variety of the characters introduced in the early section of the book by the way. These characters disappear for large swaths of the book, and it becomes hard to care about them when they come back. On top of all the issues I had with the character work, structure, and writing style, I also felt the plot become very unwieldy. I honestly found a lot of it confusing and muddled. The worldbuilding is done chaotically, with important exposition being delivered near the end of the book instead of the beginning. It isn't even clear why we should care about the missing book until well into the story. If the sacrifices to the character work were in service of a clever plot, I could somewhat excuse it. However, the mystery ends up never feeling compelling because the plot itself feels like it was made up as it went along. I try not to be overtly negative, especially about indie fantasy, but this book just frustrated me in a lot of ways. It felt like the author threw a lot of ideas on the wall, hoping some would stick. And I wish he just wrote the book that the beginning promised instead.