2023 book 140

 M.L. Wang's Blood Over Bright Haven

I really liked Wang's previous book, so was super looking forward to this one. But it just didn’t hit the same way. The writing was great, very engaging. The characters and world were really interesting. But the /plot/ was just not super interesting. The main characters are: a woman, the first ever to be a High Mage in their big ol' magical city, and of course all the men are butts to her (and one tries to rape her); and a man from a minority group, a janitor at the magical place, who ends up as her assistant because all the men are butts. And she's bigoted toward him for racial and religious reasons (I did find the religious elements of this interesting). Blah blah. And then she discovers big magical secrets and things get mildly interesting as it goes on, and I did end up liking the end, which was unexpected. But I wanted more of this to be unexpected. B/B+.