You’d think a book can’t be both depressing and fun, but it’s all about where in the book you read. The first book is dead boring from the beginning until most of the way through. It then picks up a bit of fun. the next two books are less boring, but the series is largely modeled the same way as the Clockwork Chimera, which it intersects. It is all, everyone dies, everyone loses, and everyone is happy in vain; then the story gradually becomes less and less depressing until it ends happily. The problem is the story avoids being predictable by being too obviously tweaked to fit this pattern for a long, long setup, ending with success. In other words, it seems like a set of books, but the story is more like each series is it’s own single book, released in volumes of chapters that are completely individually unsatisfying, unless you read the last one. Much of the imagination is great and this writer is much better than a few fantasy and science fiction writers I have read who sacrifice reason for short bouts of drama more extremely.