Ok all finished! That was exciting! OMG that part where he... to his own... gggaaaahhhhh!
I loved the corvun thing at the end (lady night? Maybe I missed the foreshadowing to interpret the association) and I think my favorite line of the book was "The streets were dead; not just quiet, actually dead. Corpses of cats..." There were moments in the climax where I thought of City of Stairs and City of Blades (perhaps b/c I've read them recently) with the mystery winding up to the god-battle. There were some things Bennett did better, but there were other things I think Cam did better. What struck me about this book was how genuinely intimidating that final battle felt-- the god felt really... god-powered. With Bennett the tension sort of gets shunted into a surreal LSD trip. I liked the teeth-grinding tension of confronting that degree of power.
As a whole, the take on magic was really unique, mostly because of it's physicality. That was sort of theme throughout the book, to the point that I would actually put this in the genre of "body horror" I really can't handle body horror in movies (I nope the hell out of them), but apparently I'm a-okay with it in books... it's still unsettling, but in a way that doesn't overwhelm me. The other thing I usually nope out of is alien hellscapes... idk it just creeps me out too much. So I'm secretly glad we didn't go into the Far Realms.
Other things I really liked: Charra. Her character was 100% my favorite part of the book. Nathair. Everything about him just made sense and I loved the juxtaposition of his physical form with his awesome power.
Quibbles (I had two):
Spoiler for Hiden:
The Byzant reveal. It makes sense that he would become the hooded god, but the whole thing where he was able to change Walker's personality... If he was secretly a tyrant then sure it would be believable, but were smack-dab in the middle of a scene where a frigging god is getting outmatched by being inside a tyrant's head. Even with the inexperience, it's not set up as being something that non-tyrants can ever do, and even though it's described as rudimentary, there doesn't seem anything rudimentary about changing someone's entire personality and replacing specific memories, if anything that's more sophisticated than anything we've seen Walker do in the whole book. Plus Walker feels like a victim a lot throughout the book, and nahair reveling in his betrayal just kind of oversaturated the victim narrative for me (maybe a Mary Martyr instead of a Mary Sue?).
The Skallgrim invasion of Iron Port/Pacing. The book is very fast in the beginning, idk if that's the reason but I sort of felt like, for whatever reason, the significance and the severity of the invasion at Ironport didn't really register.
And finally-- I hope we get a humanized account of the Skallgrim in the next book! I'm not just saying that b/c i studied anthropology. Oh wait, yeah, I probably am. I also am playing Skyrim with a new character pretending to be a foresworn so you know my alliances
I'll eventually submit an amazon review, but rn I'm saddled with academic book reviews, and other not-fun work for like 3 months.
