Chase Kilgore‘s De’Vas Chronicles series had been floating around my recommendations for quite some time now. While I don’t regret waiting so long to check it out, since it meant I had four books to read rather than one, I do wonder why I’d been avoiding it in the first place since there’s nothing that could be considered objectionable about it beyond the initial romance being a bit too rushed.
The characters are distinct and amusing, the protagonist is plenty powerful, the additional romances are paced out well, and events move along fluidly. Really my only complaint is that the scope of the opposing forces keeps inexplicably escalating. You start out against a reclusive district boss, who was indirectly being manipulated by a more powerful district boss, but turns out he was working for shady council members, but they were working for a superpowered former councilmember… and now they were working for some even more powerful mysterious other. It’s ridiculous.
The first two of Bainin‘s Paths of Akashic novels brought to mind a combination of Guardian of Aster Fall and Primer for the Apocalypse. Although it starts off enjoyable enough, the sudden shift to body cultivation halfway through Initiation is incredibly jarring. The second novel then kind of ambles along in a weird liminal space before abruptly ending the trial year with a pseudo-tournament arc. On the fence about whether or not to continue I looked at some of the descriptions for the later novels and ultimately decided against it after seeing what the fifth decided to focus on.