I enjoyed this a lot! It’s a mix of fast and slow paced, but in a very different way than most SFF. I don’t think it’s a flaw as much as it is just different and therefore prone to be disliked if you want more traditional pacing. There are multiple climaxes in this book that each feel like they could be the climax of their own book. But it’s not pedal to the floor - it’s still slow sometimes. I think each climax just feels plot-wise like something we’re used to being at the end of a book, and here it’s a middle step. That did not make it feel rushed for me as much as it just felt different.

One of my complaints is often that first books feel like giant prologues - here you get something in between. The first quarter of this book is like a prologue. Which is just not the kind of structure we’re used to, but I liked it.

Also unusual is the minimal info dumping. What’s there is important. The setting can feel a bit fuzzy sometimes because of this. Again, to me this is not a flaw. I really appreciated the concision. But I understand that many, if not most, fantasy readers want to be immersed in a full world.

I found the character arcs all really compelling. By the end no one felt cartoonishly villainous. Characters in conflict with another move in and out of working with each other. Most of them are learning how to be break free from something.

There were times I wanted more from the story. Csorwe gets trained to fight with a mercenary group and she’ll mention missing them, but we don’t see any of her time there. If she didn’t bring it up again afterward, I wouldn’t have cared, but since she does, I wished I had seen why she misses them.

The story includes romance but it’s very innocent and sweet. Appropriate to the lack of experience they both seem to have. It was a romance I could enjoy since it didn’t feel overwrought.

Really fun read, but one that won’t work for all fantasy lovers.