The background ambient sound effects are terrible and extremely distracting. My own imagination cannot reconcile the completely irrelevant sounds with what is happening in the book, which means I have to listen more than once to figure out what is going on. For example, during a fight with elemental fire on swords, we get a dubious approximation of a single unvarying fire sound. For a marching army, we get what sounds like the steadily increasing sound of a washing machine, to the point where the narrators words are actually drowned out completely. This happens over and over in random passages and is almost but not quite enough to make me just give up on this series.