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This took me a few goes at it to read. I'm quite interested in the genre, and there's not a lot of technically well-executed books in it, so even when I was turned off it, I wound up coming back.

The first time I read the book, I put it down somewhere after the second chapter. The protagonist is whiny and selfish in a way that had no subtlety, and the rampant tense issues just really ground me down. So I put it down for three months.

And then I returned. Listening to it through text-to-speech helped me ignore the tense issues, and was able to get more into the story, when it became enjoyable. But I did get to a point probably about 2/3rds along where I just had to set it down and walk away and resolve to DNF the book, even if I was somewhat curious about the ending, because it's just so long. It's fully a half to a third too long of a book. The pacing is glacial, to say the least.

But a week later, I was looking for something mindless to put on, and I really did want to know how it ended. And so I polished the last third off.

To be fair to the book, its ending was quite excellently done, and largely satisfying to me. And the mechanic was interesting and well explored (if in a way that could have really benefitted from a restructuring of the plot). And the character growth of Zorian is notable in that it is significant but not perfect, intentionally so, and that's far more interesting than a protagonist whose flaws and issues are neatly packaged up by the end.

But it doesn't change the fact that the book has massive, massive technical issues. Even aside the simple matters of wandering tense or unedited length, the book eschews genuinely interesting conflict in favour of always saying 'nah, actually, it's this OTHER dude(tte) that's the problem.'

I'm not really interested in complaining about the book. For a first effort it's impressive, and given that it was a serial web novel, the length issues are understandable. But in terms of recommending it to someone to read, it needs to be accompanied with a caveat, nor should it be as glowingly recommended as it was to me. Read this if you're profoundly interested in the genre and less picky than I am, I guess.

Disappointingly riddled with errors, but most unforgivingly there's a point early on in when the protagonist and his fellow apprentices go from frosty to monologuing their lifes' stories in the span of a second. That sort of emotional negation -- and the tendency to long-winded infodump in the face of characters whose motivations don't align with sitting still for an unanticipated story hour -- is the sort of jarring thing that yanks me right out. DNF.

Couldn't make it past the first twenty pages. Initial exposition felt ham-handed and forced and what should have been a very emotional scene felt hollow and forced. Wasn't my jam.