This book was okay - I don't feel angry I wasted my time on it or anything - but I guess I was a little bored by it. I mean, it had a lot of elements that appealed to me, but they just didn't add up into anything particularly compelling. There was all this court intrigue that I hadn't really been given any reason to care about. There were all these dire situations the main characters fell into, but they weren't really emotional enough for me to get swept up into. There were long stretches of everyone just chillin' in the city or what-have-you for purposes of character and world development, which could have been interesting but just... weren't. There were bits here and there that really caught my interest - the crossdressing antics on the ship, for instance - but most of it was something of a slog. And the writing was a bit on the clunky and unfinished side, too.

I fear I might be a little unfair in rating this two stars, because I get the feeling this was just not my kind of book. I wanted the whole book to be SPIES! DANGER! ANTICS WHILE IN UNLIKELY DISGUISES! RAGING SEXUAL CHEMISTRY. Unfortunately, that was only a tiny part of the book, and the rest of it was taken up with epic fantasy tropes and politics that really kind of bore me.

To draw me into epic fantasy and twisty politics, you have to be a very special kind of book; you have to be intensely character-centric and really bring something new to the table. Last book that managed that for me was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. This book... did not manage that. This one is pretty much paint-by-standard-epic-fantasy-tropes - but it wasn't a bad book, by any means. If you're an epic fantasy fan, I'm guessing you'll probably like this.