Blood Over Bright Haven

"I can be civil, ma'am, or I can be honest. You can't have both in their entirety."

This book had all the subtlety of a hammer to the face. While not a bad book exactly, there's the bones of some really good ideas here, I think the author fell into the trap of trying to tackle too many ideas in too few pages, and didn't do any of them any justice.

Sciona is the first female high mage in Tiran and has something to prove to her male counterparts. On her first day, through some juvenile bullying from her equals, she's saddled with a janitor, a Kwen named Tommy (or, more correctly, Thomil) as her assistant. Kwen are seen as being lesser than everyone else as they come from outside Tiran and are assumed to be lazy, dangerous, cannibalistic, stupid, and a whole host of other unpleasant things. Rather than sending him away, Sciona makes Thomil her assistant, and together they set about her project of expanding Tiran's magical net that sustains the city. But as they look more closely into the magic's inner workings, they both realize the horrible truth behind everything that has been covered up the entire time.

I thought the basic ideas of this book were actually pretty good, if handled clumsily. I liked the idea of the magic system, and liked the incorporation of some moral ideas around classism and racism in keeping a city like Tiran running. What I didn't like was that the author tried to do too much, cram too many social injustices in, making everything feel muddled by the end. Sciona has strong feelings about a women's lot in life, and while I agree with the feminist sentiments she has in large part, I don't like the author's tendency to make every guy in the book an idiot, a sociopath, a rapist, a drunk, or otherwise bring down the entire male gender to make Sciona look better than the rest.

The entire first 30% of the book or so is nothing but infodumping of this carefully crafted magic system the author created, which made it a bit of a drag to get through. It's almost too fleshed out for a book, and many of the intricacies don't really matter for the ending to land. I didn't like the author's use of Thomil to be the infodump character; Sciona spends long chapters explaining magic to this "uneducated" Kwen in her midst, leaving the actual plot to hang. And by the end of the book, many of the plot points are rehashed so often that all of their impact has drained away by the time you get to the part of the book where it's supposed to matter.

I also didn't like Sciona as a character in general. She's unpleasant, just as racist/classist as her male counterparts, and even late in the book (ending spoilers here) doesn't seem like she really absorbs what Thomil's telling her and what she's seeing around her. She's written like she's supposed to come around on her beliefs about Kwen, but it feels so abrupt and insincere that I'm not sure I'm sold on it, particularly after some of the things she says to Thomil in anger. "Your people died because they deserved it" doesn't seem like something you should be able to easily come back from.

Just....overly complicated, entirely lacking in nuance and discussion, and really ham fisted in its execution in my opinion.