後宮の烏

This was ok. I expected more fantasy, liked the drama and character interactions, not the world building.

The story consists of little mysteries around ghosts being solved thanks to the main character's magic and the emperor's authority, usually by learning about the ghost's bittersweet past. The mysteries are very simplified. It worked well with this kind of straight forward narrative though it got repetitive and sometimes boring.

The main characters reflect on their pasts and position withi

Really well constructed book - it's split into different mysteries, but doesn't feel like disconnected short stories. Despite the complex fantasy setup there's no infodumping - unlike a lot of fantasy you're left to infer how magic, religion, politics, etc. in this setting work. I'm not terribly invested in the relationship between the two protagonists, which is a bit of a problem because it's pretty important - but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in this book so it's fine.

Difficu