Extremely strong, vivid story. I'm left with a lot of impressions – because the worldbuilding was good, because the characters were strong, because the story was better than decent. A couple of minor points like a predictable staple plot twist or sudden relationship building dialogues while in a dangerous situation didn't detract from my enjoyment. The first book in a long time that led to me just devouring it.

City of Stairs was fun, and in a surprising way. To live up to it, the second part needed to be different – and it was, in a way. The narrative structure was a bit (very) close to the last book: civil servant gets shunted off to the continent, figures out that all is not as it seems, and that behind nasty local politics there is some old divinity, thought to be dead, is at work.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is a hard book for me to rate. In the beginning it was lackluster, because it felt like very system-heavy Fantasy: Fantasy where the author cares more about the magic system than about the characters, or the worldbuilding, or anything else. After about a third of the book, it came close to hitting its stride, drawing me in and letting me feel with the thief-protagonist and her life and quandries. But then, towards the end, the book seemed to turn into a very heavy-handed metaphor on the dangers of artificial intelligence (and, to a lesser degree, computer science in general).