There was so much I loved about this book: the world building, the characters, the lore… and yet so much left wanting. This is the first book in an incomplete series, and I don’t usually read books if the series isn’t finished, but I read this for a book club. There was much left unaddressed, which I assume will be finished in future books. It’s fine and I think expected for a series to have threads not unraveled and even end in cliff hangers, but I still believe all books should have a completed story arc. It felt like I read to the midpoint or so. The characters were just getting to the turning point where reaction turns into deliberate action, and then it ended. With the novel only being about 50k words (which is low for a novel and really low for fantasy, which often runs 100k+), I felt like the author had plenty of time to give us a complete story. This book could easily have been part 1 of a larger book. Story structure complaints aside, the story itself was engaging, and I would have given it 5 stars had it been longer.