This is fine. Everything is fine. It's not getting out of hand at all.

I've seen somebody call this book "grimdark with a soul," and I wholeheartedly agree. The book is dark. There's lots of gore and violence. The whole story centers on a fantasy city that was already on the brink of a revolution, and then a single young woman's action made out of self-interested steered up all the conflicting factions and toppled the dominoes to create the perfect disaster. People die, things get blown up, and not a single character here can be described as a good person.

And yet, through it all, there's an underlying sense of community and bonds and the importance of them. There are touches of kindness and good humor. There are characters who see beauty despite the darkness, who chase their goals in desperate situations, who persevere and survive and help others do the same. There's hope—misplaced and ill-deserved at times, but a hope still.

I love stories like this.

The characters were my favorite aspect of the book. Each of them was three-dimensional and complex. Some made absolutely awful choices, and yet there always was a deep-set reason. I especially loved the female characters; Harriette, of course, with her ingenuity and quick thinking and pure determination; Rowan who seems like the one beacon of kindness in the book with her fierce royalty to her friends even when their actions hurt her, until you realize how little she cares about anyone in the world who isn't *hers*; Aida with her staunch Lawful Neutral values; Misfit of Kantor who is, simply speaking, a delight (and also a walking horror movie); and of course the Cobbler who at the moment ranks somewhere around the top of my favorite chaotic villains of all time. I would never want to be in the same room or even in the same city with her, but damn, she's impressive.

When it comes to worldbuilding, there are a lot of nice touches, but a lot of it also felt underdeveloped somehow. In some cases, it felt justified. I have a lot of questions about fairies and the whole folk horror aspect, but I can appreciate the fact that most of this stuff is something that happens outside of the city limits and belongs to villages and woods, while the book is firmly grounded in the urban setting. So it makes sense to get just bits and pieces and echoes of that aspect of the world. However, the subplot with the Old World artifacts pretty much lost me. I have very little idea what even went on there. Maybe understanding this requires familiarity with the author's other books? But isn't this supposed to be a standalone?

As for the plot as a whole, it was fun, tense, and full of cinematic moments. I did get a feeling that too many twists and important plot points relied a bit too heavily on coincidences, though, or perhaps on chance and good/bad luck. Each of those moments, taken in isolation, made sense, and each of those coincidences was in some way rooted in the relevant character's past actions, so it's not like there were gods springing out of machines or anything. But because there were just so many scenes that could be described as "the character would surely be dead, but suddenly, X," it felt like a bit much. Still, a lot of those very moments I'm talking about were really, really cool! So I think they could simply use some better balancing against the ones where the characters got out (or into) hot spots via more direct actions of their own. 

Oh, and one last thing: the framing device with the letter? That was fun. It kept me guessing throughout most of the book (whose letter was it? what was its significance?) and the answer was so logical, but also something I'd long discarded by the time I reached the end in favor of a more complex and convoluted option :D A really nice touch.