The Traitor Baru Cormorant

This was a difficult book to read in more ways than one. First of course there is the subject matter, but also I found the writing very hard to get into. I was halfway through the book until I had to throw my hands up in defeat and reread it from the start. I can boil down the reason for this in two things, first of all during the middle part where I gave up there was a lot of talk about finance which made me zone out while listening to the audiobook, second and more importantly the book moves too fast. There are so many characters in such a short amount of time it is hard to keep track of them. Also the huge timeskips felt like a missed opportunity. At times it felt like a summary of a book than the book itself. This is a complaint I'm making a lot these days about fantasy books but I really think there was two books worth of material in this. I found it hard to connect to Baru and I think spending some more time in her childhood to see how she was shaped to be what she is would help (though she is keeping everyone including the reader at arms length, this might have been an intentional feeling).

The side characters suffer the most from that, I couldn't talk two sentences about any of the characters except Baru herself. Although Baru is such a great character that I didn't particularly mind this. The ending was brilliant and I'm glad Seth Dickinson didn't shy away from it - though my reaction might have been different if this didn't have a sequel. This a 3 bumped up to a 4 for the ending, I'm optimistic the sequel will manage to be a solid 4 throughout and not feel so rushed, because this reads almost like a origin story looking back to it.