This is a really tricky book for me to score or review. The characters are mostly great; Jun, Chono, secondary characters like Liis, Masar, all get varying degrees of  characterization and bounce off each other in enjoyable ways. The world building is excellent and interesting enough, although mostly there for sake of plot rather than delivering any uniquely intriguing ideas, which is totally fine. I loved how the book had its own system for gender and self-identification, and how queer it was

although a sex scene came across a little gratuitous

. I felt kinda satisfied by the end and the book wraps up alright for being book one of a trilogy, but I mostly felt disgruntled by my overall experience.

The book does not hold back with throwing you into the deep end from the very beginning. There's a lot of great world building to wade through, but I was in over my head. I struggled through the first 25% playing with DNFing before the setting, factions, and the vast amount of terminology started to come together. It took pushing through another quarter of the book before I really started to engage comfortably with the writing and the story. There was a ton to like, but between everything mentioned, the slow pacing, trying to following chapter time jumps, and trying to understand and connect with the characters, it was not an easy book to read.

A big reason for me: the core character Esek was both very well characterized and very not characterized at the same time. She swoops in strong from early on as the morally ambiguous snarky sociopath, and we get to see a lot of her throwing her title, heritage, and ego around; but for being the main character the entire plot revolves around, we don't get to see very much behind the curtain.

Most of who she is through a good 75%+ of the story is being the big sneering anti-something (-hero/-villian/-???) that blitzes through all the other things I'm trying to absorb from the plot without a lot of explanation for why she is who she is.

We finally get some explanation

near the end of the book

, but for me that was a too little too late situation. I love morally grey characters but looking deeper at their internal struggle is for me a requirement for what makes them interesting, which we do get for some of the other characters; but in Esek's case their internal struggle is obfuscated

in service of a major plot device near the end.

That simply didn't work for me, but that's a personal preference; I found what happened interesting in the moment but it didn't make up for the frustration I felt with the rest of the book. I could see why it had to be setup this way, but I think it simply did it a bit too much (I had read another book with a similar pattern of confusing majority -> !recontextualizing later plot turn and loved it, so it's not the approach itself that I dislike; we do bones mfer).

I'll have to think hard about continuing with book 2 when it comes out. For now I'm not sure I want to.