Still waiting on a promise's fulfilment

I understand that Guy Gavriel Kay is working with some heavy Chinese influences in River of Stars. But, so far, one idea that he has made extensive use of has been to the book's detriment: using a multitude of point of view characters, no matter how socially small they are at the time.

This bothers me because since the first few chapters of part one, I've come across nothing else about Ren Daiyan, the son of small town official who runs away and becomes a bandit. Since then Kay has introduced (as perspective/major characters) a poet, another official, that official's daughter, her husband, the Emperor of Kitai, the Deputy Prime Minister, his wife, an assassin, and a servant girl who effectively copies what the Deputy Prime Minister's recently deceased wife did when interacting with him to seduce him. Those last two have been featured in an average of 8 pages apiece.

I, along with millions of others, am eagerly awaiting the Winds of Winter (the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire). As such, I've had some experience reading books with multiple viewpoint characters.

And, to be honest, there's nothing wrong with any of Kay's characters.

But if the books' different parts can be compared to the acts of a play, I feel like part one, looking back from where I am enmeshed in part two, did very little work setting up any sort of premise. In fact, the first section of part two, where we see the Xioalu emperor thinking his way through the various trades and political allegiances of the lands of Kitai, Xioalu, and Kislik, establishes the world much more effectively in two pages than the whole of the book's first part.

What frustrates me about this lack of events in part one is that it makes the book feel like it has no momentum whatsoever. For 150 pages, very little actually happens in River of Stars' part one. In it, we're introduced to major characters, we see them live on and struggle as time jumps ahead from when Ren and Lin are children to when they're young adults, and we witness some political manoeuvrings along with their ripples.

But if you were to ask me what the book's plot is I would have to say that it's about an empire that is changing and how these changes effect people and politics. Anything that goes deeper will no doubt be dredged up later in the book, but aside from the characters and Kay's descriptive passages, I'm not sure that I would feel interested in reading on.

So far, if this book were a ring, it would be a lovely ring with a finely handcrafted setting complete with scrolls and tiny flowers, but the stone on it would be pyrite.