Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book was very disappointing, I did not enjoy reading it. I'm not sure who is giving this book 5 star reviews, but I don't think it is the average fantasy fan. While reading, I kept hoping that all of the boring sections I was slogging through were leading to a rewarding payoff, but it never happened and the story just petered out. This is probably because the author put the climax, the most interesting part of the book, at the beginning with no lead-up or explanation, so the reader can't appreciate it or even really understand what is going on. I'll start with the good factors first. The high-level world-building in this book is excellent. I would love to read more about this world if it were written in a better style. The social aspects are also interesting, the author obviously put a lot of time into tying in themes of slavery and racism. However, the good factors of the book stop there. It seems like the author put all her time into the high-level ideas and forgot to write a compelling story. We hear about every single character's racial make-up, no matter how insignificant they are, even when it doesn't matter at all to the story. We also find out the sexual orientations of a few characters and they happen to be exactly one heterosexual, one homosexual, one transgender, and one bisexual. I applaud the diversity attempted here, but it feels forced and generally speaking doesn't add anything to the story. Speaking of the story, this is really where things fall apart. This is mainly because there isn't really a storyline and it's written more like a prequel to a more interesting story. Various scenes are shown from around the world, but there's no real plot except for reacting to an outside event that drives the character in a particular direction. The characters are disappointing too, as they are technically interesting people with technically interesting characteristics, but they are generic, one dimensional, and don't really do anything interesting for most of the story. They have very little motivation and hardly accomplish anything. It feels like this book either needs to be a lot shorter or a lot longer to actually flesh out the story and the characters. Additionally, the book is a bit dark and nihilistic feeling. The main characters don't really want anything but peace for themselves and the book makes very sure you know that they aren't going to get it. It's like the hero's journey got stopped at the rejection stage and then the world decided to beat them up for the rest of the book. Finally, I should address the magic system which is also disappointing. Again, the author sets up the large-scale world-building well, but doesn't deliver much at all on the details. We get to see a few flashy uses of the magic and some general descriptions of how it works, but no detailed explanations. This makes the fights all feel a bit too convenient because there is no reasonable sense of scale or consistency. Sometimes the magic can do amazing, huge feats like channeling a super-volcano that feel a bit too easy and could be the climax of the book itself. Then five minutes later they can't do the equivalent of punching the guy standing near them. I also have no idea what would happen if two magic users fought. We get a number of conflicting answers throughout the book that vary from them completely nullifying each other's power to the stronger one easily overpowering and killing the weaker one. To follow up on this, we never even get to see them training! We hear generalities about it offscreen, but it would have helped so much to get a tutorial by watching the character learn and grow in their powers. I have no idea how the author managed to make such interesting powers boring, but she did.