Reading this felt a little bit like someone wrote a fantastic, epic saga and then was then told, oh we need it to be a third of the length, so they crammed it full of all the awesome stuff and left the rest unpolished.
The main plot points seemed to be wrapped up by the end, and you can definitely tell that the author had a lot of elaborate plans but was hindered by publishing constraints.
The beginning was interesting but not my style. I was getting a little tired of it around the middle and was probably gonna rate it a 7.5 but then the ending came and it was a 9 to me - though it wasn't perfect, I really loved the end. The art is a basic older style but there are a lot of fantastic scenes and beautiful lines.
Unfortunately, there are confusing, erratic scene jumps that sometimes had me feeling like I missed a few places. The narrative was all over the place.
There was some uhhh 'interesting' gender fuckery going on. Idk if I would necessarily say it was bad, but I do think it was handled clumsily. Tbh not surprising for the time it was published.
I liked a lot of the themes discussed in the novel, and there were a lot of interesting characters that I would have liked to see more of.
[Trigger warnings for mentions / depictions of infanticide, suicide, rape, incest, pedophilia, child abuse, violence, ect.]