2!

The old stuff was able to move quickly because there wasn’t much substance to its events, while newer fantasy novels are often more thoughtful but parcel out their ideas more slowly. Blacktongue Thief is best of both worlds.

Every time I read something that’s rich with ideas throughout its whole run makes me wonder why every fantasy novel doesn’t just do that.

A good contrast would be just about anything by Guy Gavriel Kay, who also structures his novels as sequences of dense, rich scenes, but in stories that don’t pull the reader along with any cliffhanging devices. It’s more congruent, and I think more satisfying.

I think it might be the pacing. Having the plot be a high-speed chase but the narration of the chase spare no details or digressions felt dissonant.