I’m reviewing mid book 4, thus early, because it is so typical. I expected the story to be a little better, since it is the fourth book and the pattern is that it starts out very, very bad and gradually gets better until the last book ends, but the fourth feels like a mini reset. It starts out bad and stays bad more than half the book.
Edit: Now half way through book 5, same trashy extended boredom for the beginning of the book. The most obvious solution I thought of half way through book 4 was their solution. Why!? Why did it take four fifths of the book wasted with negative events that were inconsequential and mostly better just being skipped over to get to an ending that could have been in chapter 20?
Though this is a talented author, he really should try to improve on the pattern of making the boring setup last way too long. So much of the story is explaining just how bad the situation or scenario is for the main characters, plus killing off people who are already scarce because of the last war. The story becomes all the more unbelievable (the bad kind) when there is always more bad stuff coming for the foremost majority of the story and the protagonists miraculously win without any real moral principle or true intelligence explaining how or why.
I rate the story relatively high because the narrator deserves it and some people might get a thrill at being bored and depressed through most of the story only to end well. That is a thing – like a happy ending thriller, but for a typical fantasy sci-fi story. It’s not my thing, since the mood and flow of the story is so obviously artificial and hard to get engaged with. After thousands of books, I keep reading because this author is better than most. I just have to skip to the next chapter once I have the main idea of the current one and the story becomes more interesting. That is not an option for much of my work with my hands not free.