I finished Daughter of the Empire. Like that one anon said: it's pure political drama. I found the book to be pretty nice. Yet, I'm still feeling unfulfilled. There was almost NO magic in this book. It barely counts as fantasy.
The character writing, while decent, doesn't do enough to compensate for this fact. There was some good moments, and the book is well structured. But it just doesn't have the weight to it, in order to justify how lacking it was of the fantastical.

Mara was an interesting enough character. And the story followed her for 95% of the text. But at random, the author would give us other points of view, in order to fill in some context. It felt a little cheap the way he would do that.
I don't know if it was done on purpose or not. But Mara's husband has no lines of dialogue, up to the point where he's suddenly abusive. Everything about the man was told in vague descriptions from Mara's PoV. and then suddenly, BAM, he's a raging abuser, and he talks now. That might have been deliberate for effect. But it still felt odd.

There wasn't much mystery about what was going on. Each chapter had a self contained problem and solution.
The politics weren't very smart. It was just a lot of petty people doing petty things, and then hiding behind a twisted system of honor in order to get away with it. Every chapter is like that.

Also, the author compared EVERYTHING to a Needra Bull. THIS is like a needra bull. THAT is like a needra bull. needra bull, needra bull, needra bull. Hang on. I'm going to search for instances of needra bull in the text: 81 mentions of "needra"! Jeez.

Honestly, I feel kind of like a fool. Because I read 3 books just to get to this one specifically. And I don't even like it that much. It was *ok*. But... I wanted more fantasy in my fantasy novel. Is that really too much to ask for?

I won't be continuing with Feist's works. He's not bad. he's just not for me.