Unsatisfying

By some chain of events that I'm not 100% clear on, on Saturday afternoon/evening, I went down a rabbit hole of searching for female-led fantasy books. Again. I can't count how many times I've done this, and yet the results are most often frustrating and unsatisfying, in a way that makes me feel like a weird gremlin.

Part of that is that I'm incredibly persnickety about what I'm looking for, and none of the people who have tried recommending books to me really gets it.

( a random sampling of some of my idiosyncrasies: )

So on a whim, I started reading Michelle Sagara's Cast in Shadow (published in 2005). I daresay it's quite a good book. It's well-written, and the worldbuilding is intriguing. Various mysteries are laid out meticulously and answered piecemeal. Conflict abounds. If I didn't have a series of incredibly specific sensitivities, I probably would have enjoyed it greatly. Followed by enjoying the next 15-20 books in the same series. About one a year since the first one, maybe? Anyway, it's a lot of books.

But 2005 wasn't a very good year for me, and something about the context of the book sent me back there in a way that I didn't care for. I didn't finish it.

I can neither recommend, nor counter-recommend it.