Update: upon learning that the monsters are, in fact, taken directly from Dungeons & Dragons manuals and not at all original or noteworthy, I'm removing yet another star from my rating!
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Ugh. This book is like if prepubescent boys take on a months long Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It's riddled with sex jokes, flat characters, rampant sexism and homophobia. It's also soooo loooong. We don't even get a fight scene until almost 200 pages in! And the fight scenes are the only thing this book does well and the reason it gets a two instead of a one.

The characters were boring with little to no growth or anything of interest. They're exactly the same at the end as they were at the beginning of the book, plus a few battle scars, I guess. They get thrown into ridiculous scrape after ridiculous scrape and just kind of bounce right back as if it didn't happen (like, when you go so far as to cut off a warrior's hand you don't just... Grow it back 10 pages later?) It lacked all the rules of a reasonable book, instead granting our characters more of a video game's approach to impossible situations: would you like to try again with absolutely no consequences to this previous failure?

But honestly, the way women are treated and portrayed in this book is the worst. They're flat archetypes: the perfect wife, the addict, the whore, the seductress, the villainess... It was so boring. It makes me never want to read fantasy written by a straight man ever again.

I'm really sorry to those people who opted to read this book with us as part of a buddy read...