I don't start liking Vlad until he starts growing up, which for me happens in Teckla; but I do like Teckla and everything set after it.
And it is very much young Vlad, not early Brust, that I have issues with. I've been reading the series in publication order, not internal chronological order (though Brust plays enough games with flashback to make reading in chronological order a challenge), and while Brust's writing does improve as the series goes on, I don't like the later-written books set before Teckla that much either. (Though they both have saving graces-- Taltos introduces a lot of worldbuilding, and Dragon gives some clues about the in-world provenance of the novels as texts.)
Brust tries a lot of things in this series-- different genres, different structural tricks, different viewpoints-- and that makes the series hit-or-miss for a lot of readers. But they're fast reads, and I find that enough of them do something I'm interested in to make it worthwhile to keep reading.
(FWIW, my favorites are Teckla, Phoenix, Orca, Athyra, Issola, and Jhegaala. Also the food porn parts of Dzur, though I don't even remember what the actual plot was in that one; I skimmed all the story because I wanted to get back to the menus.)
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And it is very much young Vlad, not early Brust, that I have issues with. I've been reading the series in publication order, not internal chronological order (though Brust plays enough games with flashback to make reading in chronological order a challenge), and while Brust's writing does improve as the series goes on, I don't like the later-written books set before Teckla that much either. (Though they both have saving graces-- Taltos introduces a lot of worldbuilding, and Dragon gives some clues about the in-world provenance of the novels as texts.)
Brust tries a lot of things in this series-- different genres, different structural tricks, different viewpoints-- and that makes the series hit-or-miss for a lot of readers. But they're fast reads, and I find that enough of them do something I'm interested in to make it worthwhile to keep reading.
(FWIW, my favorites are Teckla, Phoenix, Orca, Athyra, Issola, and Jhegaala. Also the food porn parts of Dzur, though I don't even remember what the actual plot was in that one; I skimmed all the story because I wanted to get back to the menus.)