The entire story felt carefully engineered, and I kept seeing parallels to tropes in fantasy I've been familiarized with. As something that's as well regarded as this is, I kept expecting to have all these tropes turned on their head and have them slap me on the face, but they just kept coming. The characters especially felt like they were heavily inspired by fantasy tropes, and in the end they're mostly just kind of archetypal. In general, it lacks spice. But that's quite possibly due to non-spicy stories selling better.

But the engineering worked. After about 1/3rd of the story I was drawn in, and I'm going to buy the next one.