Honestly, not as bad as I was expecting it to be. I just didn't have a whole lot of spare time to read it in a reasonably short timeframe.

As I've seen other people say, the author throws a lot of characters at you with no explanation of who they are. The glossary at the end helped somewhat after I was done reading. I suspect this is a book you'd have to read again (after reading the entire series) to really appreciate.

Definitely better than any of the Wheel of Time books, at least. Just kind of hard to follow. And I think you need to be kind of nerdy to stick with this series. It's no Game of Thrones.