The plot is much more interesting than the first book, but honestly I can't sympathize with Alina no matter how hard I try, and as she's the one telling the story it's torture to listen to her rationalizing her stupid-ass decisions and how "everyone at this farmer's market palace wants me carnally". She kept rationalizing all of her dumb decisions, deciding they were dumb and going through with them anyway... ugh.
At one point I honestly just stayed for Nikolai, as Alina and Mal seemed to have given all of their braincells to him, the one person with a functioning neural network