The first half was far weaker than the second half. Second half was good, but not fantastic; writing a rotating cast of characters takes a lot of skill, and in the first half especially we didn't understand how they related to each other. In the second half, once we understood, it was far better.

The prose, especially in the first half, also got in its own way a lot. Once we actually got narrative up and going--which took a hell of a long time considering the length of the book--the prose fell to the wayside (as it largely does in good genre fiction imho) but the first half was something of a Pretentious Prose Fest™️.

There's a lot of cool elements here and I'm probably being generous with my rating because of how much I loved Soq, and how decent the ending turned out to be, but I'm not sure the other elements were executed with much finesse.