I very much liked The Mirror Empire. Characters are well-rounded and likeable. The story feels epic and the plot is one I haven’t seen before.

On the downside, I never managed to get over the overcomplicated character names which made the entire read-through quite frustrating and, at times, hard to follow.

The world building is solid, albeit confusing at times, most noticebly at the start. The different races / cultures are nicely balanced. I especially liked the whole thing with the 3 different genders and 5 pronouns to refer to gender. Although I don’t feel that this adds much to the story by itself, it is nice that the author went outside of the ‘box’ on this one. The completely surrealistic take on fauna & flora feels like a natural extension of the same out-of-the-box thinking. Again though, this tends to get confusing at times if you use real world names for made-up creatures (e.g Tame bears with yellow snake eyes and purple forked thongues that are used as horses).

The writing is solid and pleasant.

4 stars for a book I very much liked.