This book did something I rarely encounter in fiction: I was able to come back to it multiple times without finding myself particularly annoyed about it.

This novel has an odd sort of rhythm to it. For about 2/3rds of its length it doesn't really have a lot of dramatic dynamics to it. Everything has about the same level of heat, the same level of emotion. But Arkady Martine is such a confident writer, with such a clear sense of how to define characters and how to set a scene that I didn't mind.

Every time I came back to this book I still remembered roughly where the main character, Mahit, had been when I left off, and what relationships she had with other characters. So much of the vibe of this book stuck with me even though it took me forever to finish the damn thing.

Martine focuses on the sort of things I like in books like the Dune series and Game of Thrones, but it's a quality you can't exactly set a filter for on an Amazon search: deep interpersonal relationships that are often political. There's often a lot of nuance to any given conversation, and sometimes it just effects the way to characters feel about each other, and sometimes it can impact the entire empire. That weird sort of energy will keep me enthralled across a lot of pages.

And it doesn't hurt that the third act picks up to an intense degree. It reminds me a bit of the book Invisible Library, where the first book almost feels like a pilot for a series, a test chamber where the main characters are sorted out and the rhythm going forward it defined. I finished both books after some struggle but found myself interested in picking up the next. There are definitely certain series that reward the patient.