I had a considerably worse time with this one than with the two previous entries. 

First of all I mentioned in my previous review that I was pretty excited about the prospect that the last book's ending provided. To say that the plot that got teased there was majorly derailed would still be an understatement. Yeah there were some preparations and the ending finally got us there but overall this was just underwhelming and frustrating.

While I still do enjoy a lot of the slice of life in this book. The friendships/relationships are all fun and keep me engaged and I still especially like all the magic school stuff where we also got introduced to a bunch of new classes in this book which a particular one also tied directly into one of the main story arcs of the whole series.  

My major gripe though comes from this book's biggest plot point which was a tournament arc. And while I do think that the main event of that tournament was pretty fun, everything leading up to it felt frankly just boring, kind of repetitive and also just dragged on for what seemed like forever.

Especially the repetitiveness in the writing is starting to get on my nerves and those are by means short books overall. I am thinking that I have to start to space them out more so that might not be that much of an issue going forward since I am still interested in what’s going to happen to this overall lovely cast of characters.

Maybe listening to it alongside reading a Malazan book is also not the greatest idea since then you kind of have to compare Erikson's elaborate, complex prose with the extremely simple writing style of this series. Travis Baldree’s narration continues to be pretty damn good though.