I’ve been trying to write this review for days now and I can never get my thoughts to come out clearly and concisely so please excuse me if this review is a mess. 

This book is way longer than it needed to be and nothing happened the whole time. It was the same thing chapter after chapter. 

This book is 500+ pages of world-building and by the end, you still understand nothing about the world or the magic system. The world is way more complicated than it needs to be, we are constantly being given information about the world that adds nothing to the story and only confuses us more. 

I know this isn’t the author's fault but I have to add it, the map in this book frustrates me so much! The map though beautiful, is useless. It is way too cluttered and it's impossible to find anything on it because of that and to make it worse all of the writing on it just blends in with the background. I was trying to find one of the locations and I spent thirty minutes looking for it and still found nothing. 

The characters are boring and have no real development throughout the entire book. the only characters I was interested in were the villains ( I will say one thing about Victoria Aveyard, she knows how to write an AMAZING villain!). There are also way too many characters, there are a ton of side characters that play no real role in the story that just randomly get brought up and we expected to remember them even though the last time they were talked about was 200 pages ago. 

Overall, this book had a lot of potential but ultimately it fell flat for me. I am going to continue with this series because I already have the second book and I do see some potential for the rest of the series.