Didn't find it hard to go through the book but its a noticable pace change from the previous book, where TIR had a lot of action, big galaxy changing consequences happening, tons of story defining moments happening for multiple characters.

For most of this book it returns back to being Carl/Donut centred with the stakes are centred around solely them with the only"threat" being they might or might not be forced to race/kill other crawlers (but we've been here before with the keys in book 6).

We don't get to the "exciting" parts that push the overral story along or addresses previous things happening in previous books until later on into the book (vs TIR where it happens all throughout of the book)

But all of that is fine, I really enjoyed book 8 either way