I've read many reviews and recommendations that praise the book for its skilled use of fantasy tropes, but I'm hard pressed to find anything that Riyria does better than someone else. The much-hyped Royce and Hadrian are a less interesting Locke and Jean. Esrahaddon is a discount Bayaz. I can see the appeal of a lighter fantasy with the prevalence of gritty, post-GoT fantasy out there, but compared to Prince of Thorns or The Blade Itself, Theft of Swords is just not very good. I could compare the writing to the similar fantasy pastiche of House of Blades, but that was even slightly better in doling out information.

The constant exposition is also unbearable. "I'm a royalist, I believe xyz. You must be one of those nationalists, who believe abc. At least we're not those 123 following imperialists!". It's terrible. That's the whole first quarter of the book. Half the text needs to be moved to an appendix. The one monk character is a walking encyclopedia who seems to serve no other purpose than to tell other characters what is going on. Every instance with Thrace's father is unnecessary. I skimmed through half of Avempartha.

Avempartha was a slight improvement because there is an interesting g story starting to form with the Church and the Heir and the elves, etc. But it makes the first book even more of a painfully extended prologue than it felt like already. I think the real cardinal sin of these books is that they're just glacially slow. If the plot were faster, we could skip 90% of the exposition and get to the interesting plot points. There's just no excuse to having the main plot points show up in the tail end of the second book with everything before it being fluff.

The book is worth the $2 I paid for it. I'm told the subsequent novels are an improvement, but not ones I'm in a rush to discover.