My general impression of this work is that it's mainly impressive as someone's first published book. It has a lot of parts of it which are extremely rough around the edges and detract from the reading experience, but what's here is good enough that I hope to read later works by this author once they have developed a bit more.

What's bad about this book is that the narrative is fairly confusing, the art on some pages adds to that, it seems really to be trying too hard to subvert expectations, and it's a little too short so the ending doesn't feel entirely earned.

What's good about this book is that the art makes a big impact on "set piece" pages, there is a complex world set up here which appears to have many allegorical implications for our own world, and choosing to have the main character be the griot rather than the prince is more interesting than the typical fare involving princes.