Perhaps it will pick up the further you read?

The premise sounded very interesting and even though I haven't read the other books in the series it sounded as if you could pick this up and we can read it without having had read the other books beforehand. I do not believe this is the case as it was rather complicated and not engaging enough but I attribute that to not having read the rest of the books. I thought the choice of tense and POV was unusual and I wasn't a big fan of it, I also thought that the way they wrote could have been a little different as the narrative was very bland repetitive and they try to include different senses and create an ambience for the scenes but I feel they fell short and what they perceived to be good and be honest and seen descriptions or in fact very distracting and simplistic for the type of book it is. They have obviously done their research into eh time period but it felt too forced and unengaging to me.