Very interesting world. I liked the story telling, where you don't find out everything immediately, but you get to know it through the characters investigations. I liked the characters as well, although there was some seriously questionable behavior at times. In particular, the cavalier attitude of Noon towards taking Tor's energy, and even Vintage's attitude, who is actually one of the most moral characters in this book, didn't sit well with me. That was a violation.
I'm usually not a fan of following different characters, but it worked well enough for me in this book. It wasn't too "cliffhangery", and I was interested enough in all the story lines.

Still, somehow this didn't fully pull me in, it felt a little like work at times. I think I didn't fully connect with the characters. Especially Tor seems a little distant to me. Vintage is clearly the best of the bunch, but even with her, the reader is not really looking through her eyes, it feels more like you're an outside looking from the side.

Despite liking it, I'm not sure I will read the next book. With the situation changed by the end of book 1, I fear the overall sense of discovery will change. ( )

I just don't have the patience for this anymore.
Character after character, storyline after storyline, none of them establish any kind of goal. Nothing is happening at all. All these POVs explain the current situation of these characters. Some of them begin some sort of quest for various reasons but they all end before anything of relevance happens whatsoever. The author doesn't give me a reason to care about any of it.
It's all disguised exposition but it is even worse than an outright info dump. If the story anchors me to a character or presents me with an intriguing premise and then drops an info dump on me I can at least decide if I have the patience to wade through it and get to the meat of the story. I know what parts are just there to teach me relevant information about this world and which are the actual story.
Here I don't know who or what is relevant. I don't even know what the story is about. The book, as it is written, could feasibly just keep going like this for the next 480 pages, switching to a different random POV every 10-20 pages of yet another insignificant nobody somewhere in this vast world.
I have now spent 1.5 hours with this book and there wasn't a single piece of anything interesting in here.
History in middle school was more interesting than this, and my teacher didn't care for history or teaching.
I am obviously too impatient here but this just feels like I am being strung along without ever getting to the actual story.

The blurb says "and the adventurers are quickly drawn into a tangled conspiracy of magic and war."
I have no clue which of these characters are even relevant and which are just narrative devices. I have counted 7 POVs within the first 1,5 hours.
The world is vast and interesting, sure, but there is no story happening.
I think 10% of the book doesn't count as "quickly" and that is assuming the actual story begins right after I stopped reading which I doubt.

This was a consistently terrible read through the six chapters I actually managed to choke down. From clunky dialogue (and by clunky I mean forced, inconsistent and completely unbelievable) to character inconsistencies (Tormalin the Oathless goes from telling a group of village folks he's come to slay their monster to asking Vintage if she's serious when she tells him to go chase the thing off so she can follow it back to its lair), to just horrendous editing (see highlighted examples of this).

I wanted to love this series. The synopsis is fire. The monsters are interesting and fun to read. The story itself is well-conceptualized, but so many glaring writing and editing errors makes it a DNF for me. Again, see my highlights and notes for examples. How this ever won a fantasy award makes my already dwindling faith in the publishing industry that much more prevalent. ( )

Dnf, read 200/500
Great worldbuilding, really good writing style.
But: mediocre characters at best, with theatrical, unrealistic interactions, no antagonist as of yet and no real story as of yet. Maybe later, but not actually finishing the build up in 200 pages is not good writing.
For me, boring AF. ( )

I don't feel like I wasted my time listening to this because it had some really cool ideas and the writing was decent. The characters were okay, but nothing really stuck out as great (Bern was the best but he was only a minor character). There was some lazy writing, I think "like a sack of potatoes" was used multiple times, maybe she put it in there to keep moving and planned on going back to change it later but never got to it?

I think the worst part was there didn't seem to be a purpose to the wanderings of the characters for a long time, maybe the first half of the book. ( )