It's not a disrecommendation (although I reread my write-up and I guess I was even more conflicted/negative than I remembered, lol), but I did not continue with the series (I did at least finish book 1, which I did not do with Divine Cities). There's stuff about Foundryside I really enjoyed -- there's some neat magical worldbuilding (although other aspects of worldbuilding bugged me a bunch), and I liked a couple of characters, and thought one twist was interesting in principle at least. Weirdly, the thing that bugged me the most was how dialogue was written -- specifically, it reminded me of someone trying to do Brustian Vlad-and-Loiosh mental banter but with whatever makes it work in Brust missing XD

But, hah, and I'd completely forgotten this, one of my random remarks on this book was "[X and Y], early on, gave me a Varrick and Zhu Li (from Legend of Korra) vibe, although this wore off after a while". So, you know, that's now two unrelated things I'm curious to see if you'll also be reminded of :)

Hehe, I thought I remembered that right :) (The character who reminded me of Zhu Li in this is someone I liked throughout the book)