Sonia Orin Lyris

This book started off strong, with engines of pure chaos taking center stage immediately. However, the romance was forced and ill matched, poorly serving the plot. Things go off the rails when the main character (not really a hero, is he?) is literally ripped out of a scene and transported across the world to make more chaos happen elsewhere. Though the individual chapters were mostly fun from there on out, they barely strung together into a story if you squinted. Dwarven love magic destroys all pretense of a plot, essentially.… (meer)

Oof. I started this just over a year ago, when it was being praised to the skies in multiple places. I got through about half of it, in increasingly limited fits and starts; I finally decided I was done, skimmed through the second half, and while I'm sure I missed things I'm fine with having missed them. It's so unrelentingly grim - the seer spends more than half the book running away from various and sundry enemies, with people dying all around her as she dodges and they don't. And the other major character gets increasingly mired in politics and flat-out lies and manipulation - his story in the book _starts_ with him killing his brother to keep him from gaining an advantage. Ugh. It does end...kind of, sort of, happily, or at least not entirely unhappily. But I wasn't willing to drag myself through another 300 (of 600+) pages to get there.… (meer)