The author created an interesting world here and the book does take you through a significant part of it. Does so by using a lot of shortcuts though, so I'd quite like to explore and understand more of this world, The Joined Realm being a pretty short single book that focuses on what a single character knows and sees in a relatively brief span of time. There's much that's not shown and, despite some information dumps that I'd say are more necessary than jarring, plenty not even told.
There's also the matter of the series of fortunate events that allow the characters to keep going and the fact that, in spite of a number of less typical elements, the action is steered down a pretty cliche path. Still, it is enough to keep you interested throughout and overall makes for a decent read, even if the writing style is a bit rough. There's a fair need for more editing though, to get rid of quite a number of obvious mistakes.