I ran into the same problem, and was able to solve it using a tip from this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/20973822/3757370. Simply placing the setViewControllers:direction:animated:completion: code inside of a dispatch_async block on the main queue fixed it for me. For you this would look like
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
[self.pageViewController setViewControllers:@[ [self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:_pageStoryBoardIDs[0]] ]
direction:UIPageViewControllerNavigationDirectionReverse
animated:YES completion:nil];
});
Hope it helps!