long. dragons. I wanted to love it and I did not love it, explanation below, sorry in advance

so this was meant to be perfect for me. a standalone doorstop. no waiting for book two, no waiting for book six, no checking a blog on a Tuesday. eight hundred and something pages, a map at the front, four viewpoints, dragons on both sides of the world. I preordered it. I was so ready.

and I liked it. I want to say that first because I know how this is going to read. I liked it and it took me five weeks and I do not think that is the book's fault entirely, I had a lot on.

the good stuff. Ead is a properly good protagonist, competent without being one of those characters who is just good at everything for no reason, and the whole business of her being a plant inside a court she is loyal to in a complicated way is great. Tané is better. Tané is the one who got me, the East material is denser and stranger and the water dragons are actually alien in a way the western ones are not. and Niclays! Niclays who I expected to hate! a bitter drunk alchemist who has ruined his own life and is still being ruined and is funny about it. he is the most alive person in the whole book and it slightly annoys me because he is the one I was least interested in on paper.

Loth — I could not tell you one single thing about Loth. he goes places. things happen near him.

so what is my actual problem here? it took me ages to work out what it was because my first instinct was to say it's a fetch quest, it's four people going to get four objects so they can do the thing, it's an MMO questline. and that IS what it is structurally. but then I sat with that for a bit and thought, right, so is basically every fantasy novel I have given a ten to, including one with a literal shopping list of metals in the appendix. so that criticism is not honest, I withdraw it.

no. what it actually is, is that the magic has no rules. and I am a rules guy. I want to know the cost of a thing, I want the limits established in chapter four so that in chapter forty someone can do something clever inside those limits and I can go OH. this book has jewels that do things and a tree that does things and sorcery that is roughly vibes-based, and when the big moments come I have no way of knowing whether what just happened was hard or easy or clever. so it just sort of happens at me.

and that is a taste thing. that is me marking a book down for not being a different book, and Priyesh has told me this to my face, and he loved it, and his actual quote was that I only like books that come with a spreadsheet. which stung because it is true.

other things. the romance is genuinely well handled and I usually skim romance and I did not skim this one. the last two hundred pages are excellent and if the whole thing had that momentum we would not be having this conversation. and the ending does not cheat, which after eight hundred pages of setup matters more than people give it credit for.

things I will not defend myself on: I did about a hundred and fifty pages of the middle on audio at 1.4x while decorating and I definitely missed something in there. probably several somethings. one of the four-object bits, I could not tell you where they got it or from whom.

so. six. which for me is quite low and I have been slightly braced about posting it because the people in my group chat who love this book LOVE this book. and the honest summary is that this is a good novel that is not for me, written for a reader who wants a myth and got one, and I turned up wanting a machine.

which is why I have already got the prequel on my shelf and will absolutely read it. I am aware. do not message me about it.