Thank you NetGalley and Orbit Books for letting me read this book early! All my thoughts are my own.

This starts off as any typical high fantasy novel; magic, intrigue, lots of world building. But, unfortunately even with all that I had to DNF this at 20%. It wasn’t the slow world building, or even the multitude of random places that can cause confusion, but rather one scene in particular. I just…can’t continue after this scene (and unfortunately don’t want to spoil the book for others). It felt very stereotypical of an 80s high fantasy scene, but in this day and age was just so misogynistic and unnecessary. Perhaps it had some context from the first series? But as a new reader to the series it just gave me the ick and I couldn’t read further. 2⭐️