To start, I only listened to this cause the second book has an anthrophonic character on the cover, not many fantasy stories focus on them so I was excited and had to start here.
It was not worth the time. The main characters are rather bland and are stubborn about the wrong things at the wrong times. And the information dumps for many parts of the story made it clear the writter didn’t trust the reader to figure things out along the way, many of the early chapters are nothing but in universe lore dumps for how things are the way they are now,
And the “romance” was just so unbelievable and felt forced for how the main relationship in the second half of the book was done. It was just so not well done and became the bane of me listening to the second half when their was no real chemistry between Lago and the Bear (forgot his name).
And every character who travels with Lago is either a hindrance or quickly stopped being useful or interesting and just another mouth to be talking when they go most ignored at times. Alaia was just a beacon for attention when they were on the run, and didn’t ad much beside backing up Lago’s annoying wave of thought for their situation, Bear was the most useless animal companion I have ever seen and caused more problems then helped. And the two older characters that could have been interesting,
The villains were the only one really progressing but they were so unlikable I hated going back to them. Nothing about them made me want to see what they were doing or if they were interesting since they quickly stopped chasing the MCs for this book.
Honestly not worth the time, has the promise of something more but boring as can be, and more annoying then anything.