Great review! I think you captured the interesting duality of this book: difficult to get into, hard to read, but with fascinating concepts.
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Must’ve been a wild day for Sutekh when the TARDIS got turned inside out.
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This book had nothing that I enjoyed. 0.5/5
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You finally finished it though 
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The only good thing about it…
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I’m not really fond of it either, but Gallifreyan lore-building, even a bit ridiculous as it is in this book, is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me 
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Now that’s just mean 
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Sorry about that 
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OMG what a slog this book was to get through! I started it months ago (before I joined this site) as part of a planned read/reread of all the VNA’s in order, but had given up after the first few chapters. (First time round back in the day I would have skim-read it, just picking out the good bits - I know I must have done this as there were parts of it I had definitely never read before.)
The Book Club motivated me to go back to it, but even so it was a struggle, until the last couple of days when the end was in sight and I finally forced myself to finish it.
The sad thing is there were lots of good things about the book - the world-building was incredible and I found it very easy to picture (and often smell!) the scenes from the descriptions, and the plot was very ambitious and ingeneous - but it all got buried in dense and repetitive prose.
I think the same story could have been told better in half or even a third of the length with a racier & more accessible style like the NSA’s which I can generally race through in 2 or 3 days.
So this was really just an incredibly frustrating book. I hope it’s not going to be typical of the VNA’s, but I know I have read some of the later books in the past & not felt like I was wading through treacle, so fingers crossed!
It does beg the question of where Sutekh was all that time though…
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