This is one of those books where the action sequences deliver, and you can actually believe in the team. It reminds me a bunch of early Culture novels, only instead of force fields and minds, you have magic shields and contracts tying everything together, like in the Craft Sequence but with spaceships.

Ironically, having magic be explicit with spaceships goes a long way to making the space opera more realistic in my mind, since there's no point handwaving with FTL drives and the like. It's magic. Deal with it.

My only gripe is that the villains are too villainous. I don't think anyone really talks about themselves like that.