This book gets good about 300 or 400 pages in. Before that it's a whole lot of purple prose and extremely sex positive courtesaning. The prose never stops being purple, you just get used to it. About halfway through the heroine starts having really great adventures that aren't just about who she is having sex with to gain information.

The world building is fantastic. For all the slowness of the first half, everything that's mentioned or happens in the beginning later has a payoff in various dramatic denouements.

And this book has all the things I love in a good fantasy story. There are mysterious prophecies that come true in unexpected and dramatic ways. People have to make terrible sacrifices. There is danger and adventure and when the book is at its best, events that follow the inexorable logic of ancient Greek myths or Arthurian tales.

There is a lot of weird sex, none of which I found sexy even though I actually like reading about that kind of thing, normally. But on the other hand, I didn't find any of it upsetting, unlike say the unrelentingly and pointlessly gross grimdark rapyness of a lot of other fantasy series that try to handle sexual themes (hi Malazan books). I suspect the author may have deployed excessive purple prose around sexuality specifically to make it less titillating. Well it worked. I haven't ready less sexy accounts of explicit sex since reading de Sade.

But, and I have to give credit here, the weird sex always moves the plot forward. The plot might plod but it always moves forward and eventually there is dramatic payoff.