Aw, this was just a lovely thing to read. Following several characters in a magical world. There are so many stories all mashed together (small town girl is extremely smart and magical, but learns that the Boys Club system was never actually interested in allowing her a fair shot, and so she sets off to blaze her own path. Conflicted troll, fighting against her clan’s expectations and their disregard for her identity choices. Disaffected officer (youngest son of a bankrupt Lord), dealing with PTSD and trying to find his way in the world. Handsome and tragic young Mage Lord (greatest wizard of a region) dealing with his tragic past and the responsibilities of his position. The world is full of diversity (different races and cultures and species and religions) and lots of interesting and different approaches to gender identity and sexuality (across species and countries and religions). The way that magic works in this world was interesting, too. Basically all spells/magic are created with mathematical equations and parameters. It was fun to be able to see characters working on a practical real world task to create their spells. The pages flowed well, the dialogue and characters were interesting. And gosh darn it, the side story of Jeckran and Tsira falling for each other was just so dang sweet. Both of them are so concerned about consent and not wanting to ruin their partnership and thinking the other isn’t into them (Use Your Words!!), that it’s just full of lots of longing and blushing and sideways glances and rushing out of the room. It was just super sweet. The plot moves along at a good clip, with new things being introduced often. There’s even a murder investigation/detective plot for the 2nd half of the book. Now, the criticisms: The world building is bit uneven and unclear at times. I really love when books just drop you into the middle of events and the world’s rules reveal themselves as the plot unfolds. But that wasn’t 100% successful here. There is a LOT of new vocabulary (names for countries and religions and regions, etc) and it wasn’t always clear what exactly each one meant. I mean, as a world-building junkie, I also don’t mind big paragraphs of exposition (and a map at the beginning. And a glossary/cast of characters at the end). This novel could’ve been improved by having some of that. As it was a bit inscrutable, I would just move on…expecting to soon encounter that term again, with more context over what being from that region or religion means…but that didn’t always happen. So that was imperfect. My other main critique is that the final bit of the book wasn’t as great as what came before. I’m not exactly sure what was lacking (as one would imagine it would be great when all of our characters finally meet up, to work together on the main mystery). But it didn’t touch my heart in the same way as previous parts of the book. Maybe it was too focused on plot and we lost character details. I mean, there’s still fun banter and cute little moments, but I didn’t love the final quarter of the book as much as I’d loved all that came before. Still, it was the perfect thing to read over a few sunny days and put a smile on my face/made me chuckle several times.