I told a friend I was looking for a fantasy-ish book that wasn’t just “dragons fighting wizards” (no shade, just not my thing) and this book was both amazing and also terrible. Impressive world building, luxurious writing, lots of great tale-telling but long and slow slow slow and ultimately full of a lot of recursive stories without enough central plot to want to take all the little diverging paths. Few female characters and no good ones. I felt weird about not liking it because it’s so obviously a good book fro some people, just not for me.