It might be useful to know, going in, that this is one half of a duology, so it ends abruptly at the point where, arguably, the story is really getting moving.

It's also quite slow to start: The first third of the book consists of brief glimpses of the protagonist's childhood mixed with explanations of the worldbuilding and backstory, before it finally settles down to a contiguous narrative around the time she turns thirteen. I struggled with the first third, but found it easier to get on after that.

Some of the worldbuilding is quite interesting, though I felt that the most interesting parts ended up feeling like window-dressing that didn't really affect a fairly familiar-seeming plot. I expect those parts will be more important in the second half of the duology, but I'm not particularly interested in reading on and finding out.

One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past, I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and disbelieve all of it?