Yeah Priest’s novels are always a bit of a struggle. Probably because they’re very hard to translate, even if the translator has great English and doesn’t make grammar mistakes, the flow of the writing always seems a bit off.

Another thing is that her novels are very ambitious, I usually think about the effort to payoff ratio of web novels, some novels are very light but you get a surprising amount of meat in them (drama/plot twists/world building/wider themes), I think Priest’s novels really maximize the latter but not the ratio, sometimes it just doesn’t feel worth it to read, hah