finally gave up & dnf-ed the spear cuts through water. my thoughts here or under the cut -__-
i gotta be realistic & say im frankly never gonna finish this book, either in paper or audiobook form. i had already found all the things i disliked about this book at about 25% & nothing i read after convinced me otherwise. in summation: i dont mind the framing devices being employed, i even liked the use of italics to jump into the heads of minor characters & hear their outside perspective on the story (though, the tool peaked early, as far as the first 50 pages, & the rest of the time it conveyed just about the same information the prose already had. upon seeing his beloved father being killed a minor character will helpfully remark that it is sad & bad & they loved their father :<! which, thank you! useful addition to the word count!), but despite all the formal glitz, nothing about this felt unique. if anything, there was a hodgepodge of other fantasy features (telepathic animals that serve as quasi-telephones like in one piece, the framing device of a story being told to an audience like in kalpa imperial, the main plot serving to quest over what happened to the moon that was, once, in the sky & now is no more, like the broken earth trilogy) & more than occasional vague gesturing at concepts that meant to suggest texture but all i got waved in front was a short-hand. sure, yeah, whatever, this is a love story.
on slightly more pedantic complaints, i genuinely disliked how in a story that has the aspiration to be describe an ancient tale there was such a not infrequent inclusion of modern lingo. sure, you could make some arguments that the framing device, but that does not erase my dislike of seeing 'okay' & 'fucking idiot' or any 'fuck' & feel they were a little jarring, a little too afar from the rest of the prose.
as for more pedantry, i think this book needed the first 30% to be more tightly edited: this goes for slight continuity errors such as 'moonlight glinting off a blade' (what moonlight? the setting's moon, at that point, had fallen & personified on earth, leaving a huge hole), as well as one of the main character's disability being primarily conveyed through dialogue & social stigma, but with no effort in describing how any of his movements, such as rowing a boat, would be affected by missing an arm. it is a bit weird to know that a spear, some types of which are a two-handed weapon, was given to a one-armed man & to not have it brought up how keema is handling that or how his combat style differs from other or even from himself before his amputation. again, i call it pedantry bc by the 35% mark it does improve on what im complaining about, which is why i think its an editing issue that nevertheless persists for an absurd number of pages.