I’m reading the third book right now and so far the series has been a real struggle to get through. In the first two I found the setting mildly interesting, but mixed with uninteresting characters, dialogue, and plot, with writing that was entirely too verbose and with too many repetitive phrases (like “he raised an eyebrow,“ which happens about once a chapter and sometimes even multiple times per page—see also chuckling, rolling eyes, and snorting, which occur at about the same frequency). Clearly not everybody finds this irritating but I definitely did.

I don’t think I had any problems like that with the writing of other fantasy series like Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones. Nor with two other trilogies I read for the first time this year, C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and The Three‐Body Problem.