This was a warm and fuzzy book about a secretary to the emperor of the entire world who takes a chance to break protocol and ends up shaking up just about everything.
This is a pretty long book – more than a thousand pages – and I was satisfied and felt the story was complete about halfway through the book. The main character is a kind, proactive civic employee doing his duty in a very subtle way. The book goes out of the way to show what a kind person he is, and indirectly shows that his (huge) family back home doesn’t really know what he does or how great of an effect he has had on the world.
The worldbuilding by the author here is phenomenal and deep. There is a lot of history for each of the areas of the kingdom and their people, and it is amazing to think how much time the writer has thought about this. One complaint I had was that given this huge world and the multitude of people within it we spend an inordinate amount of town with just the main character. We hear about other people only indirectly through him.
The root of this book seems to be the transitioning of a mere secretary to the emperor with some slight access to power to someone who wields power on their own. Even though our secretary rises through the ranks and becomes a powerful person he never seeks to use this for his own benefit, and the book spends a lot of time fawning over what a great person he is and how his family doesn’t really understand how hard he has been selflessly working.
As I said, at the halfway point I felt like we had reached a logical and satisfying ending, but unfortunately the author continues to go on and on praising our main character, giving comeuppance to people that look down on him or his people, and even creating entirely unbelievable and perfectly arranged situations for this guy to lead the triumph of humility of selfishness. 500 pages of this. Really! There must have been an editor involved with a book of this size but I felt like they really should have stepped in and chopped out a lot of this to make a more readable and enjoyable book.
Next I am reading Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree.
