Probably closer to 1.5 stars than 2. Man, I am 0 for 2 so far this year and it's really bumming me out. 
 I wanted to like this. Adult queer fantasy, blurbed by Jacqueline Carey, constantly appearing on Goodreads lists... I was expecting something more along the lines of Luck in the Shadows, honestly. There'd be hardships, but our plucky adventurers would overcome that surely! 
 ... What I got was more like The Steel Remains and we all know how much I didn't care for that. 
 Listen, I don't mind the dark and gritty. I can handle that, even if my preferences tend to skew away from it in general. And even though this ended well, all things considered, there's only so much I can take. Let me break some of it down: 
 It takes eons for anything to happen in this book. Like literal months pass. It felt like I had been reading it for ages. And it wasn't always in a bad way, but wow sometimes this could not move any slower. 
 There was like one named female character in this entire book. And listen, I get it, it's M/M fantasy, but even that was such a quagmire. None of the other gay relationships in the entire book are particularly healthy. The only character I was halfway rooting for was Gideon and he got dropped about 60% of the way through for plot reasons or something. Not to mention the entire plot hinges on the rape of the main character and I am just so done with that concept in general. 
 And poor Felix, he was just a vehicle for the plot instead of an actual character. And reading about his madness was interesting for a while but eventually it became too much. Especially since we never really got to know or care about him before everything went horribly wrong. Mildmay was definitely one of the bright spots in this but even that wasn't enough to save this. 
 This is the first of a quartet and there is so much just left dangling but boy howdy I just do not care. So I'm done with this.