I genuinely do not think I have ever felt this conflicted about a book review before because the frustrating thing is… the actual STORY was not bad.

The politics were still interesting.
The world was still engaging.
There were still moments that reminded me why I became invested in this series in the first place.

And yet somehow this ended up being my lowest rating of the entire series.

The reason?
The audiobook narration completely changed my experience.

Now before anybody misunderstands what I mean here — this is NOT me saying British accents are bad. I am literally British myself, which honestly made this even stranger for me to process.

The issue was consistency.

After spending four books becoming attached to a certain tone, narration style, atmosphere, pacing, and overall “feel” of this world, suddenly hearing such a noticeable shift in narration style completely pulled me out of the immersion. My brain just never fully settled back into the story the way it had with the previous books.

And when you listen to audiobooks as much as I do, immersion matters A LOT.

People sometimes act like narration is just background noise layered on top of the story, but audiobook listeners know that is absolutely not true. Narrators shape characters, emotions, tension, atmosphere, pacing — literally the entire experience of the book changes depending on the performance.

That is exactly what happened here.

Even during scenes that should have emotionally hit hard, part of my brain was still distracted trying to adjust to the different delivery and tone. Instead of disappearing into the world, I constantly felt aware that I was listening to an audiobook.

That disconnect sadly affected almost everything else for me.

And honestly, I think this bothered me even more because this change happened in book five of the series. If the narration style had sounded like this from book one, I probably would not have questioned it at all. But changing the vibe this deep into an already established world made it feel disconnected from the rest of the series in my head.

That being said, I still do not think this was a terrible book.

There were still good character moments.
There were still scenes I enjoyed.
And overall I am still glad that I experienced this world and continued the series.

But unfortunately the immersion simply was not there for me this time, and because this was an audiobook experience, that ended up affecting my rating far more than the actual plot itself.

Final Rating: ⭐️⭐️