Blithe Haven: THe Red Harvest

Blithe Haven: The Red Harvest is a brutal book. The world is punishing, it is scarred by a distant apocalypse and broken into warring city-states ruled by the cults to savage gods. It is a potent and evocative setting, with plenty of neat moments of world-building and more of a low-fantasy feel. Low-fantasy usually isn’t my preferred setting, but it works and compliments the world here, giving many of the fantastical elements an air of uncertainty, especially concerning the gods which are nebulous as to whether they actually exist or not.
The characters were a bit of mixed bag for me; on one hand, they’re enjoyably complex, with conflicting motivations and personalities and touches of psychology; on the other, none are particularly likable. It is not that I found them particularly unlikable, their personalities are generally fine, but my engagement in the narrative derived more from how utterly barbaric the antagonists were, because, as stated above, the world is brutal. Our villains torture, murder wantonly, abuse, burn literal hundreds to their gods in blood sacrifice, and more besides, and many of these are characters the author lets you know first.
The weakness of the book is that it felt a bit rough in execution. There was no particular element contributing to this for me, but just several cropping up inconsistently. There’s occasionally awkward prose, random descriptions that felt thrown in and didn’t seem to fit the event being described, a fairly significant character dying abruptly without seeming to fulfill any narrative purpose despite have a loud narrative conflict and presence, etc. None of it was egregious, but all together it just prevented the story from ‘working’ for me.