I enjoy epic fantasy with a complex world every so often. I found this one too complicated to follow in audiobook format and fully understand as the story unfolded. The book has A LOT of made-up names and places—as does happen in fantasy—as well as author-created words for concepts or objects of the foreign realms. So much so that the author includes an 18-page PDF with the audiobook that includes 11 pages of terminology along with maps and a description of magic in the world. Any book with that much specialized vocabulary won’t be an easy read/listen. It’s particularly tricky with an audiobook. Unlike flipping back and forth in a physical book, stopping and starting an audiobook often (especially in the first part of the book as it uses a LOT of words and phrases you’ve never heard before) to refer to multiple pages of notes is not simple or enjoyable, at least for this listener. Trying to remember these words and phrases from one part of the book to the other isn’t easy or pleasant, either. I felt sorry for the poor narrator, whose pronunciations of these different words/phrases were uneven. She even mispronounced a few regular English words, probably because of the complexity of the rest of it.
As for the story itself, I didn’t enjoy it. Too violent for my tastes. Immolation and forced public stripping with “medical” inspection … amongst other possible triggering events. Umm, just no.