A novel that dances on the cusp of being a masterpiece…
I found the world-building intriguing, and much of the plot and ideas were great…
However, for me, it had a big flaw: it was tough to follow. I liken it to a drawer filled with pieces of mismatched knitting wool, and the reader is tasked with picking up the bundle, and working hard to unravel the woolen threads from one another. Is this end piece part of this wool, or is it not relevant? Is this colour of wool on a different section, or is it an entirely new thread?
I felt tasked; worked; to crawl through the reeds and find the pieces of the plot and how they all connected together.
The chapters are incredibly long, verbose, and often cryptic. There’s little exposition. I didn’t feel party to the plot, I felt like I was merely observing it. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand something, the plot was moving forward, past it, onto something new.
This form of storytelling makes me feel disconnected from the world. I don’t know what’s possible in this world, no level of baseline understanding is reached, every new threat is brand new, impossible to comprehend, and without exposition that explains it.
Ultimately, I felt as though this was too much like work, rather that leisure. It is not for casual readers. It is for those who want to unravel these threads and put in this effort to discern relevance.
What is most disappointing about it is that the world-building and lore was so good that I desperately wanted the story to be more coherent, and less investigatory, and I wanted to reach the end in a satisfactory way.
It’s absolutely not a bad book, with a bad plot, or bad characters. However, it takes significant effort to bring yourself to a place of understanding, in order to work out what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to – that definitely has it’s appeal to some, but not to me.
I’ve come out of this process not as a ‘hater’ but at least with a full understanding that this story just isn’t written for me. It speaks volumes for the author’s skill that I can have an overall negative experience with the story, but come out of it still supporting it and appreciating it’s existence within the fantasy genre.