Reviews

This book was… not good. It was just interesting enough to pull me through to finish it, but I'm not going to continue with the rest of the trilogy.

The book felt like the first-ever novel written by a grown man with the mind of a horny, sheltered, conservative Christian teenager who just learned he won't get in trouble if he swears. There are many parts to this, so I'm going to bounce around a bit, just like the perspectives in this book.

Yes, the point of view continually bounces around to seemingly random perspectives that are authorially convenient but not narratively driven or necessary or beneficial. For example, one short chapter from the perspective of a shirtless woman ship captain in order to provide exposition to the reader what's going on behind the scenes. Except that I don't think I actually learned anything narratively meaningful from that chapter.

Oh, and why was she shirtless? ~~Because boobies.~~ In order to show how foreign she is. Because "in our culture, bare breasts aren't scandalous, but bare ankles are! And it's just so hot in our country we have to keep cool somehow." Never mind that doing so on a ship in the ocean under the sun would be way worse than loose-fitting lightweight clothes. Truly, an inspiring understanding of the diversity of the world's cultures: exactly the same, except their women go shirtless. ~~Plus, now we get to imagine boobies.~~

Speaking of women and their tantalizing bits, I can only recall one single adult (or even nearly-adult) female character that didn't have at least one description of her curves, or her cleavage, or the size of her breasts, or the extent to which her legs were bared, or the fact that any number of male characters couldn't take their eyes off her. But of course, when several noblewomen dress up for a party and show more skin than normal, "very few of them can pull it off", and most of them look like "cheap whores". Hmm, that's a lot of judgment coming from someone who just described it all in vivid detail and then continued to do so.

Speaking of judgment. Violence and murder are bad, but when the main characters do it it's understandable and forgivable. But you know what isn't? Sexual nonconformity. The worst characters in the book are rapists (who don't discriminate by gender) and also psychopathic sadists, or practice coerced polygamy and have a god complex, etc. And there's a very special place in the city's prison for the "worst criminals in the city", the animalistic, cannibalistic, violent rapists who are, nevertheless, referred to by their worst crime: "sodomites". (Are you catching the theme here between sexual nonconformity, rape, and mental illness?) And the one character who was actually raped becomes a gay prostitute working for the criminal underground. At first I thought "Oh, well, it was a different time, this was written in 19—" oh wait, nope, it was written in 2008. Unacceptable.

This all is in contrast with the three most important characters, who are all virgins because of course they're so virtuous (even while one of them is murdering innocents):

The Mary Sue (surprisingly not the main character) who is big and tall and handsome and strong and charming and beloved and rich and good at fighting and who
dumps his promiscuous fiancée (though he says he'd forgive her, because he's so virtuous of course) because the king orders him to marry the underage princess. At this point, he's just turned 21 years old and he marries a 15–16 year-old girl. And he consummates the marriage, because "I'm allowed to do this".
Yikes. Is this the author's self-insert?
The main character, who seems to be like the author's darker Mary Sue, who's able to fight really well and is handsome and is best friends with the real Mary Sue and who
gets magical powers and then gets revenge on his childhood bully who happens to be the rapey psychopathic sadist mentioned above.
Hmm, maybe also a self-insert of sorts?
The ugly (but also curvaceous and beautiful, etc., etc., as described several separate times?) seemingly-unobtainable crush who has low self esteem because of facial scarring but of course the main character is a good guy who can see past it to the beauty underneath, but also literally every male character comments on how hot she is, but also she's soooo ugly. Or something?

And it's good that they're all virgins, and it's very important that we know it. After all, there is a god in this setting. It's definitely not just the same as the Christian god. You can tell because he's referred to as "The God" instead of just "God". So different. By the way, this god has absolutely zero narrative purpose in the story, except to show how this one family is holier-than-thou, and how you can give up your evil ways and be saved by him. Hmm, but is definitely not just the Christian god copy/pasted into the story. Surely not.

As for the rest of the characters… they're a hodgepodge of people with narratively convenient hypocrisy and varyingly coherent motives who have to monologue (aloud to other characters, or internally to the reader) to explain why they're doing things, all of which makes for a plot riddled with holes, sloppy descriptions, a shocking amount of childhood sexual assault, cringey dialogue, an overreliance on tropes and clichés, and a poor understandings of how things actually work (why is someone drawing a bow back and touching the string to their lips!?). The magic system feels like half a dozen half-baked ideas stitched together and conflictingly described. The names of places and people feel linguistically jumbled and inconsistent, which I know isn't as important in the scheme of things, but it definitely bothers me.

I could go on. TL;DR, I won't be finishing the remainder of the series.