Took me a good few times to get into this, but that's true of some of the stuff that now sticks in my mind as the best fantasy I know.

That said, tho, I later tried to get into sequels etc, and really struggles there too - this whole series just didn't stick with me.

With fantasy, I sometimes struggle with character names: maybe cultural variations in readers are just too hard to make this work universally, but I could never take Pug seriously, because of his name. (Relatedly, High Lord Kevin in the Thomas Covenant series suffers similarly.)

Very much guessing when I read this.