The world, narration, and storyline are actually extremely good. The universe, setup is all great. The problem that makes me almost put the book down several times are that the main character (MC) is so OVERLY self detrimental, and vacilates between brilliance and stupidity. As such we are forced for long sections to listen to his internal monologue where all growth never sticks, and the negatives could be summed in several lines, but takes forever. It’s not that he has blind spots, that’s a positive. It’s that he, for no reason, backs out of revelations and self reflections where he realizes growth, and then acts like those entire parts of his life never happened. He is brilliant in many things, and thinks deeply about quite a bit, but for no reason given or shown immediately forgets the growth he just made less than a day before. This wouldn’t be so bad, if the MC were dumb, or had some other issue causing it, but there isn’t one. I also wouldn’t be as annoyed if the author didn’t spend EXTREME amounts of time on the internal dialogue where the MC is growing, and then putting himself down the next section. You actually see/hear his internal thoughts of growth and overcoming the negatives in his life for multiple minutes, and then for no reason, less than a day later in the story, he has a multi-minute self deprecation fest harping on how useless and pointless he is after just spending as much time realizing he isn’t pathetic and that he is helping. Then he ignores his companions who tell him otherwise, or his campanions don’t mention the growth he displayed in the past (even the one IN HIS HEAD who had to suffer through the long internal monologues as we do). The Author is spending way too much time setting up angst, and growth (that does nothing the next section), when the MC has actual world impacting issues to face.. And finally we get entire scenes where the MC doesn’t use his signature powers because who knows why. If the narrator wasn’t as good as he is and the universe setup so intriguing in it’s possibilities, I’d probably drop it.