About halfway through so far: Enjoyable, very fast read. Scenes flow from one to the other –as Charlie said– without much causality other than Delphine's Blue's Brothers' esque declaration of the cities the party must travel too. The engagements are fun, the violence medeival, and the imagery gothic which is all around well done.

I don't mind the disjoint side quests of the story, it reminds me of Don Quixote/The Green Knight. Only complaint is that –despite the medieval horrors– there's no real sense of danger. Protagonist has literal plot armor and has already been resurrected 1.5x. I don't mind the girl's annoyingness I think because she's an angel (whereas the protagonists of Warbreaker sucked for a lot of the same qualities). She's not annoying because she also seems invincible so when she's disobedient in stupid-ass self-endangering ways, you can kind of shrug it off since you know she'll be alright. But that, at the same time detracts from me caring about her/the protagonist in a way that would make the book better.

Finished the book. The disjoint quests drag on a bit, and even after the climax, I'm a bit underwhelmed by how little some of them contributed to the story. We got:

• River monster to introduce the protagonist

• Horny feast to introduce the Lion demon

• Flashback to further expose protagonist

• I forgot which story developed the gay priest (because there were so many, they almost blend together)

• Several otherwise meaningless one-offs that just reinforced the party as a whole without meaningful info other than "this is the group, you must care about them"

The climax itself is sick as fuck, and it could almost standalone without any prior knowledge of the characters which is a bummer for the first 3/4s of the book which are kinda moot in light of this. I was waiting for some revelation/prestige calling back to the tribulations that make up the majority of the book, but the only thing resembling that sort of payoff is the epilogue which is also sweet, but could've been equally powerful with just 3 "side quests" to 1) intro protag and his story 2) do something else to convey the passage of time 3) epilogue and it would've been about the same.

A bit too much filler overall I think, but a good read nonetheless

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