This fantasy of manners brings out a character who would more usually be sidelined and places her centre stage. ( )

I always hesitate to review books by authors I know because I know reviews and ratings are important and mine, being merely a booklog that happens to be public, always suck:

1) I rate super-strictly in order to be useful to me (to distinguish clearly between books that are cataclysmically life-changing through to books that I merely enjoyed tremendously);

2) my reviews aren't balanced even about my own view - I just mention the things I particularly remember or want to remember or that are thrilling or bugging me in that particular moment, which are not at all the things someone who hasn't read it yet should know when deciding to read it. To make matters worse, I managed not to log anything for a year and am currently trying to catch up all in one go.

So, no-one read this, okay?

What I mainly recall is (as usual for me) being less interested in the romance which is the main plot than in the subplots of the mechanics of writing an opera and building a university. This is the kind of triviality that's endlessly fascinating to me.

Also that, as more people join the circle and get added as points of view, I find it harder to track people and get pulled into their heads. So I enjoyed it a bit less than the previous books in the series, but that's really praising with faint damns because I still enjoyed it tremendously. ( )