This, as well as book 0, have been soo close to 4 stars.
The author invested a lot of time into crafting believable complex and flawed characters and she succeeded. The interactions and dialogue between characters feel very real. A lot of attention went into polishing those interactions into something very enjoyable.
While the emotional landscape and character interactions were very well fleshed out, the bad guys were all absurdly stupid and cliched cardboard cutouts.
Which was a real shame because the author demonstrated that she is capable of writing morally grey characters with believable motivations.
The plot, in general, is rather meh in books 0-1. It's almost like the author spent so much time living in her characters' heads that she completely forgot to construct any kind of interesting plot.

The premise is well executed but the tightly intertwined magic system isn't well defined at all.
The magic never really came into play beyond being a plot device.
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