I started this from the House War books as the 4th book in that series insists that this series must be read first. After trying and failing to make sense of the wall of text on the author's site that's supposed to be a catching up for those who only want to read the House War books, I opted to give this series a try, hoping it would make more sense in context.

I'm going to plow on with the next book but I found this one disappointing. I've thoroughly enjoyed many other books by this author. It's glaringly obvious that this is an early work. She's apparently improved a great deal over the years in both pacing and world building. This book is downright tedious to slog though and when it picks up a bit, it merely gets to a slow pace rather than just standing dead still.

It is set in a cringe-worthy country that's just a melting pot of "foreign" - it's got East Asian, Indian subcontinent, Middle Eastern/North African, and Mediterranean elements all sort of randomly put in a blender, apparently to act as a contrast to the northerners, who are a pretty fantasy-standard Western European sort of culture. Needless to say, the foreigners/southerners are both the bad guys and, unfortunately, the main characters - they're into slavery, subjugation of women, and warmongering, among other things. This contrast between the two cultures may be more obvious to me (having started off with the books set in the north) than to someone who started with this book instead and I'm willing to accept that it may not have been entirely intentional (or at least conscious) on the author's part.

The bits set in the north and the few segments devoted to the couple of not-entirely-awful southern characters keep it from being entirely unreadable. It feels, to me, sort of like that one Game of Thrones book where it feels like 3/4 of the book is focused on Cersei - for most of the book I was basically just skimming trying to get past the excessively long bits about the bad guys so that I could get to the parts that actually had anyone I wanted to read anything (other than their death scene) about.

Admittedly, the bad guys aren't quite bad enough for me to get invested enough to want to see them dead either (as with Game of Thrones). They're all just self-centered and overly ambitious - out to get what they want without caring who or what gets hurt in the process. Kinda like a bunch of megacorp CEOs and I wouldn't want to read a book that goes in depth into their thought processes and conspirator-to-conspirator conversations either.