It was valuable to me as pretty much the only Haskell resource I read that addressed more complex concepts without hitting a point where they needed to resort to mathematics.

I've never had to resort to mathematics (like category theory) when learning to use Haskell in real-world projects. And I don't think Hutton's or Bird's rely on mathematics for teaching Haskell.

Can you give me one such example?

Does the verbosity interfere or can you skip over details you don't need?

Well, if you are reading the chapter, it's because you want to understand it. Since everything in this book is verbose, you can't just skip the verbose parts.

Half the examples contain jokes or cutesy animal sounds (onomatopoeia). I like jokes, but it is distracting me. Especially when I don't understand the cultural reference.

My biggest gripe with the book is that the examples can feel quite contrived. Its probably super hard to make a book featuring all concepts without having contrived examples. But I remember reading a chapter and some arbitrary abstraction is introduced. Problem is, based on that example, I don't realize when the abstraction is useful.

It might be impossible to write a Haskell book that is neither terse not unnecessarily verbose.

Since you can get some chapters for free, I'd recommend you just download them and see if you like the style.