This is Game of Thrones as written by a hyperactive fourteen-year-old on crack cocaine. The cast grows to 50+ characters over the course of the first three volumes (despite several being killed off for good), and half of them are cunning politicians all backstabbing each other in more and more convoluted schemes while the other half consist of figures like "Alus the autistic three-armed wyvern gunslinger who fights dragons with his lightsaber" and other such over-the-top nonsense. Reading it requires a degree of patience and comprehension (being able to follow back-and-forth dialogue helps), and a certain taste for both the intrigue and the crazy action. Follow along, however, and it rewards you: each of the five light novel volumes so far has improved upon the last, and I'm greatly looking forward to the next.

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Listen, the story for this is fine enough. From the little I did I read I can admit, it was relatively interesting. However this book is written in such an annoying way it I feel genuine pain trying to understand the words. What is the problem you ask? The book does not EVER say who is saying what line at any point. Just straight up dialogue in quotations without a hint of who is actually speaking. Now I know you don’t need to say who is saying what for every single piece of dialogue when people are just going back and forth, but literally NONE of the dialogue ever says who is talking. So you have to just try and figure it out based on context to understand who is talking, quite the struggle when you barely know anything about the characters yet. It is incredibly frustrating not from a direct storytelling perspective, but instead from the writer clearly not knowing how to write. Please do not read this book, and if you for some reason feel like you need to, look up a sample of the first couple of pages so you can understand how painful this book is.

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