She also seemed most interested in the worldbuilding around the Berethnet Queens, too -- like, the coolest thing in the book for me was the backstory around all of Sabine's various ancestors and their different ways of dealing with the constraints of being a ruling queen with the responsibility of producing an heir in a theoretically gender-egalitarian society, she'd clearly spent a *lot *of time building out that history and developing it, and if the book had really just focused in there then all the other worldbuilding would have felt like really neat and expansive hints of a bigger world and I would have been impressed! It's like she put just enough work into all the other parts of the world to make them interesting addendums to the Berethnet storyline, but not quite enough to sustain a close examination when the focus shifted to a different POV who actually lived there.