oh man did I want this to be a new favourite book. I loved that it was a sapphic romance, and I think a lot of other people will love this more than me, but I mainly had technical issues with it. And it being a debut, I think that I will keep my eye out for future releases from Helen Corcoran to see what she does next!
The first-person duel POV threw me off first, but I found that throughout it got easier and easier to distinguish Lia and Xania's POV from each other, which is hard to do, so I thought that was really well done.
This is the first "fantasy of manners" (fantasy kingdoms but no magic) I've read and I quite liked it. This is a book that's very plot-driven and has a LOT of politics and names involved and I don't /really/ mind that it wasn't character-driven (though I do prefer the characters pushing their plot to the plot pushing them) because I do like the politics. 
Mostly, however, I had issues with the pacing of the plot AND the character's and their relationships. This could've easily been a duology instead of one book, and I think I would've preferred that. There's a lot of times jumps, sometimes months-long, and suddenly all kinds of plot has happened and the narrator is reciting everything that happened during the time jump. This ultimately made it feel very told-and-not-seen and info-dumpy, and when the characters made decisions I thought were dumb, I found it difficult to see their reasoning because we weren't spending enough time with them for their actions to make sense.