Vanessa Nelson‘s Taellaneth series starts out a bit rough, with a noticeably awkward/stilted writing style. And while I’m fairly sure it’s intentional to mirror the protagonist’s state of mind… that doesn’t make it any easier to read.
It picks up nicely as the series progresses though, eventually also introducing a tertiary romance subplot toward the end of the third book. Main issues would be that the world-building is rather unclear, making it difficult to tell at times if the series takes place in a pure fantasy land or some kind of alternate Earth, and the fifth book doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It’s in fact arguably more questionable than the first of the author’s Fractured Conclave novels.