we were giants, once

The world is fascinating. Everything works on funky-ass rules, the magic system feels like a bunch of deeply classic concepts synthesized into a coherent whole, and the history of the world bleeds through every page. You can tell that Erikson is an anthropologist: he's really deeply attached to why anyone is anywhere and he wants you to know, too. He manages not to bog the plot down with those details, though, letting character perspectives filter exposition so you only get a manageable amount at a time.

The story itself is pretty neat and tidy, framed as a collision-course structure that slowly brings multiple groups and interests into one place for the climax. It does have some intrigue and mystery, but most of that lies in the worldbuilding and historical questions of how things came to be. Most characters' motivations are laid pretty bare.

The weakest point of the book is Erikson's prose, for sure. He seems uninterested in style and voice, instead using a very... let's be nice. A very utilitarian diction. I think this book hits a solid fifth grade reading level.

However, that's exactly why I was able to keep track of so much shit the whole time. Erikson's simplistic prose genuinely does scoot itself out of the way to make space for the parts he's interested in. It makes his action suffer, true, but he tends to keep his action scenes pretty short as well, chaining multiple brief and meaningful encounters into a longer climax rather than expanding one single event. The sequence at the beginning with the battle at Pale and the scene near the end where Raest is fighting toward the city are probably the longest protracted battles, and they're only a few pages each.