I picked this up as part of a returning-to-YA-classics because I was looking for something lighter to read while falling asleep. Geomancer is unfortunately less good than I remember it being. The characters are almost unanimously unlikable, have no arcs, and don't actually learn anything in the hundred thousand pages that this book feels like. Irvine's plot points out lots of odd things --- most notably a character's father being in bed with another man, at which our narrator is "disgusted!" --- and then doesn't do anything with them. The 75% of the book is long and slow, and spends a lot of time with our main character dealing with an addiction, that she never solves, and is repeatedly used against her, by the same people, to accomplish the same goal. And then the last quarter goes SUPER FAST where everyone manages to cross the whole damn continent on foot in a few pages and then open up a damn hole in the universe and get her sister killed and then be betrayed and sell out humanity. All in like 100 pages. My guess is that this guy didn't have an editor.

All in all it's an OK read. The story is pretty interesting, but would be much better if it were 1/5th of the length.