The reading is definitely getting easier. It took me weeks to interpret the first couple of pages, but I finished the last two pages of Chapter 1 in a couple of hours. That's still awfully slow for me - in English I can read a page per minute! But I felt very successful when I did those two pages so quickly.
It is a little annoying that the book doesn't give answers for the exercises. I know there isn't necessarily only one "right" answer for each item. But it would be nice to have some examples of how to complete the exercise items. It would also have been nice if they had given all the characters from the story in the vocabulary sections instead of just some of them.
Doing the exercises is helping me to understand some sentences in the story that I had difficulty interpreting, though.