The Steerswomen are repositories of knowledge. They wander the world, wherever their curiosity leads them, learning things and sharing their knowledge with everyone else. They are sworn to answer any question from anyone, and in return, everyone is expected to answer theirs. Whoever doesn’t is banned and no Steerswoman will ever answer their questions again.

Rowan, the titular Steerswoman, is curious about a particular kind of rare blue jewel. She traces the jewels back to a particular area, and notices similarities in where and how the jewels are found. But someone powerful seems to take a dislike to this line of exploration and tries to have Rowan killed, repeatedly. The story follows her investigations and explorations into what this all means.

I rather like the Steerswoman concept, and several other ideas in this book. I like the way the world gets uncovered – how small but astonishing differences between that world and ours come up in asides.

Although sometimes the asides are quite contrived. “Do you remember anything else about that ordinary, unmemorable event 15 years ago? – Oh yes, I remember looking up at the sky and noting the position of the Eastern Guidestar.” Admittedly Guidestars are important navigational fixtures in this world, but who remembers that kind of detail 15 years later?

It’s not a bad book, really, but not a particularly good one either. The plot is a straightforward mystery, and every new revelation is so gradual and slow that none of it feels surprising. Maybe it’s meant to make readers feel good about being ahead of the game? To me, it just made the book feel really slow.

And for a book so focused on knowledge and logic, this one has logical gaps in the plot that are just too big to ignore.

That banning thing, to begin with. It would work for more or less famous people, but how would the Steerswomen enforce their ban for ordinary folks? How would they identify the people, keep track of the bans and communicate them to each other? “Hey everyone, that brown-haired peasant guy in that village a hundred miles away is banned now.”

To take another example: a young boy in a small village discovers explosives (probably gunpowder) by trial and error, using no prior knowledge. Just happens to mix a few things together? That he just happens to find, with no need for processing or refining?

The characters are likeable but there is no depth to any of them. They all have predictable reactions to everything and make trivial observations. “Oh look, this boy no longer annoys me, now that I don’t lie to him all the time.”

There’s one exception, though, and that’s their reactions to people being violently hurt or killed. From all that happens, I don’t get the impression that this is a violent world, or the people particularly cruel or fatalistic. Quite the opposite. And yet Rowan has no problem letting her sidekick torture someone, while she herself just zones out and thinks about some maths problem. When that boy with his gunpowder blows up a fortress with hundreds of people, none of them seems concerned at all.

The writing isn’t anything special, either. Not bad, but bland.

I don’t understand all the great reviews this book has gotten. It’s part of a series, the mystery is nowhere near resolution by the end of this book, but I don’t care enough about it to read more of this.