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Loved this! It has everything I needed to have a good time: fast-paced plot, cons and liars and rogues, a swashbuckling, mysterious hero, plot twists galore, and all of this set in a complex, extremely convincing world that manages to be both entirely different from our own and very easily relatable. I'm a big fan of novels that aren't about how kings and princesses are really the good guys and we should spend our free time staring at their antics and hoping they win the day, and in that regard, this book brought complete satisfaction: individual aristocrats may have some redeeming qualities, but on the whole, the oligarchy is represented as corrupt and cynical, and the real heroes are the ones that come from the bottom, not the top.

If I had asked someone to write a fantasy book tailored to my exact tastes, it would probably have been this one :)