Brandon Sanderson is quickly becoming one of my favorite living Fantasy writers. This new series reminds me of his mystborn series in many ways while still being much different. In both cases we have exceptional world-building with complex magic systems and ecologies that are fully developed and show no scaffolding. You have different races along with semi-supernatural characters and a mystery to the whole ecology. You also get character-driven plots with plenty of character development and a slowly unfolding of their backstories in some case. The story is also told with multiple character viewpoints and here again we have a strong female character as in pretty much all of his novels. I really enjoy the care he takes in creating his characters and while the world-building is phenomenal, so are the characters. In fact I was caring so much for some of the characters that one plot point that developed became quite emotional for me - rare for a fantasy epic.

That this is the 1st book in what will be a long series is a good thing, yet this book also stood quite alone buy itself with a satisfying ending while setting up the future books. I hope the same will be true of the rest of the series.

In this case I listened to the 44 hour audiobook version which ate up two of my precious Audible credits - but it was well worth it.