This is a really weird book. For the record, I have moved on to book two because the worldbuilding is intriguing, so the weirdness wasn't enough to get me to quit the series. But this is strange.The book starts out in a very conventional manner, with a couple of fantasy tropes (destruction of someone's home village, training and/or growing up in a temple/magic school/similar collective). I have a feeling there are other tropes as well, but after awhile, the weirdness of the world starts to hide those a little bit.I'm actually not super enthusiastic about most of the POV characters (who are, presumably, the protagonists). Many of them commit a lot of violent acts and display a rather shocking disregard for life. If the author's intent was to create a society with an entirely different value system, well, in a way she succeeded. However, the more foreign and/or alien the value system, the harder it is for a reader from the real world to sympathize with the characters. I find that it is usually characters who draw me in to fiction, so this book was a bit of a departure for me.I found several characters to be sympathetic. One boy (I think he is in his teens?), Roh, is friendly and smart and talented and eager to make his mark on the world, but some factors are stacked against him. Through his actions, he displays loyalty and courage, though he is not yet of the age of adult maturity. Another individual, Akhio, starts out as a teacher for some rural children and is put in a position of power due to family connections. Revelations about the past and unsteady relationships shake him, but I do get the sense that he is trying to be a leader, trying to take responsibility, and is doing the best he can with the deck stacked against him.Then there are the female leads, with whom I have some issues. Lilia is a young girl who is forced from her home and sent to a temple to live. You might expect her to be a star student or something, based on your reading of other fantasy novels, and she actually isn't. She ends up doing laundry. You feel for her at the temple because she has a physical disability due to an injury, plus she's asthmatic. She undergoes a transformation early in the book, but she doesn't have much experience in the real world, and she leaves an increasingly large swath of human destruction in her wake. Towards the end, she seems to have an extremely inflated opinion of herself, as well as getting quickly over (in an emotional sense) the search that's been her life's goal up until near the end of the book, and I can't tell if this is an act borne out of desperation or something more sinister.And finally, we have Zezili. She is complex and there are certain aspects of her story related to gender dynamics that deserve a further look and will get one later on. She is a military leader tasked with killing thousands upon thousands of defenseless people. She does it, but begins to question her orders. She doesn't really care about the people she is killing, as people, but she starts to question the economics of it all. How is killing these people, who are slaves who, among other things, till the fields and harvest crops, going to affect her comfort in the future? It's perhaps a realistic motivation for what she does later on, but not one that engenders sympathy from me as a reader.On to world building. This is really where the book stands out. Nature is weird -- plants are dangerous to humans and some of them (trees, that is) are mobile. Dynamics between ethnic groups are nuanced and based in the world's history. Magic is interesting; various people can use power from one of the several moons, with the power waxing and waning over the years as one moon or another takes prominence. At the outset of this book, Oma, a mysterious dark moon, is coming into prominence, and this has dire consequences.The weirdest thing, though, relates to gender dynamics. In one society, there are five genders (assertive and passive male and female, and an ungendered category). In another, there are three genders. And then there is one character who doesn't fit into either scheme. In the Dhai society (the group Akhio, Roh, and Lilia belong to), people live in group marriages with multiple wives and husbands (sometimes as many as 3, 4, or 5 adults). Jealousy and fights never come up, which I find a bit implausible.In Zezili's society, women dominate men. At first you think this is kind of clever (Zezili is described as outweighing her husband by 50 pounds, which is actually an important detail when it comes to physical power), but then I really started to be bothered by the treatment of men, including Zezili's husband. I don't like it when women are treated this way in other books, and I honestly don't care for it with men here. On the other hand, it causes some degree of discomfort and it makes me think, and the portrayal was remarkably consistent.This paragraph here may be considered to contain a spoiler, but I really would not have understood this book at all if I hadn't read some reviews with spoilers before I was too far into it. This is a parallel worlds book, where certain conditions have to be met for you to travel between worlds. So just keep that in mind when you read Lilia's descriptions of the sky, etc. It starts to make more sense as the book goes on.The writing style is remarkably consistent with the world building, including pronouns. It is difficult for me to wrap my head around the different genders (I tended to equate assertive and passive female as the same gender, for example, when I probably shouldn't have, or to assign genders in my head based on names, only to find out when a pronoun was used that I was wrong about some character or other). Anyway, reading this was a bit of an exercise.In the end, what stands out to me here is the world building. I think it was quite consistent, even if there were some difficult or uncomfortable moments. I don't think it could be easy to write a world that is so unusual, so I'll give the author credit for that. I am reserving judgment on the plot until later, since this was only the introductory book in a series and felt something like a series of continuing adventures (you'd never predict where Lilia would be at the end based on how she started out, for example). The characters were less than sympathetic, though I will admit they were complex (several of them even, which is difficult to achieve in a multi-viewpoint book). I'm interested enough to continue -- and I have, being about 10% into book 2 -- but I'm not sure where this will sit on my continuum of enjoyment of fantasy series in the end.