I've been excited about this book for a while, especially due to those gorgeous covers, and since the final book just released, I'm finally giving it a go!

My expectations for this book have shrunk a little over time, due to not seeing a lot of others reading it/not a super high goodreads rating, but it ended up really surprising me! I've been reading less and less YA fantasy lately because a lot of it recently has started to feel repetitive, but something about this one just hit different. There were definitely some aspects I'd seen before, but I overall liked how it came together and was done in this one.

The world in this book feels big, but time jumps often skipped over the long days of travelling that can often bog down a story like this with such a wide world, and characters spread all around the world. I'm honestly so grateful we didn't have to see all that, because I sometimes just get so tired of the journeying, unless that's done exceptionally well. The time skips were also done in a way that you still noticed that time had passed, so it didn't feel like the characters were zipping all over the place. I also overall liked having such a large world for the story to take place in, and I'm curious how this will develop more in later books, since this first one is largely spent in one main area.

The cast is also quite large, and I feel like I never could've listened to this on audio whilst also remembering who everyone is. It does quickly become clear who's important to who, and very early on these side characters already begin to overlap in POVs, ensuring you haven't forgotten them by the time you get back to the POV that introduced them. This overlap also corresponds for the main characters as well, since a lot of this first book is them shuffling in different match ups of 2-3 characters working together at once. It's not yet a full ensemble cast, as you see how much they're all connected, but they themselves don't see that yet. I'm also really excited to see how that develops further too, and if we'll at some point have a group where they're all working together, or if it's more semi-individual plots that keep overlapping with each other. Unfortunately I did very much have preferences for which POVs I liked reading most, and was sorta bored with one frequently, but it didn't end up hurting the book too much for me, since the chapters get really short really quickly. Hopefully they're more balanced, interest wise at least, in the next one!

The plot itself is also quite interesting, even if it still feels like it's still getting it's footing in this book. The twists themselves were quite well done, not being totally unguessable/coming out of nowhere, while also not being so obvious that you get frustrated that no one else sees it. I did guess quite a few things, but it almost felt like I was meant to, and by then there wasn't much time left for the reveals themselves to come anyway. It really built up this sense of foreboding, and I enjoyed that a lot!

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, more and more as it went on. I can definitely see myself really enjoying this trilogy, so hopefully it keeps on doing what it's doing!