Started slow and dense and took me a long time in the background of other things, before blossoming into something marvelous about halfway through. This is the second in a series about what might be the only relatively safe and democratic place to live in a world whose ecology has been warped by magic and whose politics have been dominated by conflicts between tyrannical wizards for hundreds of thousands of years. The first book was about going to war with the kinds of magical and social technologies you need to secure a place like that against whatever terrors want in; this one is about finding more or less prosocial ways to learn to be a wizard in community, in a universe where that's a bit like finding an ethical way to be an exposed nuclear reactor.

I'm glad these books exist. They're triumphs of worldbuilding that make no attempt whatsoever to ease the reader in, weird and inaccessible in a way that would be difficult to pitch to a wide audience but is easily beloved by a narrow one (and I'm counting myself in the latter group even though I'm not sure I followed more than two thirds of the dialogue) -- an excellent fit, in other words, for internet self publishing.