Definitely not the author's best showing from this series. Between the multi-year time lapse in the beginning and the brand new cast of characters, the pacing is dragged near to a halt very often by the sheer amount of exposition. I'm already invested in the setting (and the dragons—mostly the dragons), so I was a bit disappointed that I struggled to connect as well emotionally with some of the characters. I'm hoping that because a good chunk of the setup is done here, the rest of the series will be more pure character-focused like previous books.