The writing was clunky, the protagonist was downright unlikeable and the story was mostly compromised of travelling, which served to build a relationship that felt awkward and strained. Let's not forget that our amazing characters had figured out who the bad guy was well before they'd even met him and when they do he gets a pitiful amount of "page-time". The climax is a good 50 - 70 pages before the end of the book and everything after that is just useless fodder that shows off Katsa's worse tendencies. This is the part where she's so determined to get to her destination that she gets annoyed at her mount for getting tired, despite the fact that she's been pushing it hard all day. One of her guards actually had to stop her and point out that she was killing the poor animal. Really unlikeable protagonist. 
 Eventually I had to force myself to get to the end of the book as I'd spent far too much money on it to just stop half way through.The protagonist managed to do something that made me want to reach into the book and hit her almost every other page and the special abilities were blown so far out of proportion that it just became silly. This is a shame as I feel that the idea of graces could have been used in a different, far superior way.