3.5 Last, but not least book of the year it seems and it's a complicated review. It's not a bad book as such and quite an enjoyable read. The story doesn't take any of the easy shortcuts that I've come to dread from this author and there are for once no marriage bells for the protagonist - though many things are left dangling (unsurprising in a trilogy). But there are quite a few unsatisfying and downright annoying things too.

The worldbuilding as such is very sketchy still and the 'funny' ethnic names for the European, African and Asian magic seem really random. It does lend itself to frontier adventure stories without any qualms on the part of the protagonists, but that is all and in itself it is a problem too. When I bought these books I didn't know that this was an alternate history without any native Americans and except for the mysterious far frontier I can't really see any reason for their omission. The fact that a big part of humanity is erased for what seems like storytelling convenience kept nagging at me after the first third of the book. Not that erasing everything nation west of the Mississippi would have been great, but it would have been a lot better still. The whole thing really took a way a lot of the good things about the worldbuilding like the different styles of magic that do bring in other perspectives and a focus on people of colour.

If you're reading it for the story and the characters and not for the world the book is probably one of the most solid of Patrica C. Wrede's work I have read - only Dealing with Dragons and the Sorcery and Cecilia series are about on the same level and the story twists here are are arguably better and less predictable, though I think one or two of the hinted things will probably still come to pass in later volumes.