This book was difficult for me to rate. There were some things I really enjoyed quite a bit, and other times I struggled to push through.

Characters: The main characters in this book (Safiya, Iseult, Merik, and Aeduan) are all great characters. They are all complex and flawed and wonderful. I especially enjoy the friendship between Safiya and Iseult. Unfortunately, I felt like many of the smaller characters weren't given enough to do. There is a character who dies near the end and I felt no real emotion about it because I didn't really feel like I knew that character at all. The stakes were not as high as they should have been in that situation. I understand that there were a LOT of characters and story points to get through, but I wanted to see Kullen and Rybar actually interact.

World-building: sketchy. We are bombarded with a bunch of place names and haphazard explanations of the different types of witches with little expositional bits. It felt like this book was trying to be a sprawling Game of Thrones-esque epic political fantasy, but it just wasn't.

Tying into the world-building, I found the first part of this book incredibly boring. The first 100 pages in particular, I had a really hard time not putting this book down and going on to something else. There is just too much being laid out without any real explanation that it makes it very difficult to connect to the story. It's funny because the book is actually very fast-paced and very action oriented even from the very beginning, but I just had a really hard time getting into it because I didn't really understand what was going on. There are still some things that I really don't understand even at the end of this book. I feel like certain things were being kept from the readers just to create a twisty reveals later or being held out for the second book and I wish that I understood what was going on a little bit more. Maybe a re-read will be in order at some point.

Like I said before this book is very fast-paced. They are pretty much on the run from beginning to end. I like that kind of a story but I kind of wish that there had been more character moments where we could've seen some banter between characters or a little bit more character development.

I really like how Susan Dennard writes and I love that she made a female friendship the focus of this book. I feel like this book was a good start and that this series has a lot of potential so I will definitely be picking up the next book in the series.