This book. I'm not sure where to start. Let's begin with the good things: 
 The Good 
 The Writing (At a sentence and paragraph level): 
 The descriptions were nice and the action scenes,when taken out of context, were very good. Although not incredible, they were overall exciting and not too much else. 
 The Two Main Characters: 
 I'm sure if you've read any reviews you've heard how much everyone loves the fact that a friendship between two female characters is a central part of the book. Well, it is pretty great, even if it can't save the book overall. It was great to read about them together and how they interacted, and their friendship was very believable. Although Iseult is far less of a poor-decision-maker than Safiya, and I liked her a whole lot more. 
 (view spoiler)[ Side note: The whole puppeteer with Iseult thing leaves room for a sequel, which I will not be reading. (hide spoiler)] 
 The Not-So-Good 
 The Witches in General/Worldbuilding: 
 How many types of witches are there?!?!?!? I get that there's the four main types of witches, (that I promptly forgot about, one of them's aether, I think, but I don't feel like looking it up right now), but there are so many types introduced during the book that it's confusing as hell. There are truthwitches and threadwitches introduced in the beginning, along with wordwitches and bloodwitches, which I could keep track of. Then suddenly there are glamourwitches, waterewitches, ironwitches, soilwitches, voicewitches, weaverwitches, etc. you get the point, there's far too many introduced in a 420 page book. I still have no idea how many there are, and it's too open-ended. Any character could literally be able to do anything. This is not Game of Thrones, there are not 5000 pages to be introduced to things. It felt like the author had a very good idea of the types of witches and how that all worked, but couldn't explain it for an audience. If you're looking for someone who did a very good job with this aspect that Susan Dennard struggled with, I recommend Leigh Bardugo's Grisha Trilogy. 
 As for world building, it was not so fabulous. So many place names and societal scructures/bits of history were thrown around that I didn't know, and I sometimes felt like this book really should have been book two after all the readers know the world a little better. Once again, it felt like Susan Dennard had a very good, solid and well-developed world in her head, but couldn't communicate it to people who don't already understand it completely. 
 The Okay 
 The Plot: 
 The plot was fine, not fantastic, but alright. There's not too much more to say about it. 
 Overall, it was okay. It was EXTREMELY overhyped. I admit I picked it up partially because I saw Sarah J. Maas gave it a great review, before I knew that she and Susan Dennard are best friends. If my best friend wrote a book, I would probably think it was great too. This book, however, is not great, and does not deserve all the hype. It's not something I regret reading, but I didn't like it nearly enough to consider reading the sequel.