I'm planning to read the Craft Sequence in publication order, so this is the first one I read.

I had trouble getting into it at first. Gladstone crams a lot of universe details into the first several chapters without much explanation. Things get less murky as you go, though, and I started enjoying the stylish prose and intricate universe, including the magical-realist(?) moments of bureaucratic legal systems governing the magic. I appreciated the centering of women as key actors and villainizing of an abusive, misogynist man.

Reasons stars were docked: at times the prose was so flowery as to be ambiguous, and I had a lot of trouble visualizing what exactly was going on. But my biggest complaint is that the characters all felt kind of flat. I'm a reader who loves to love characters and their development, and I found myself kind of uninterested in all of them, with the exception maybe of Cat. The protagonist seemed a bit Mary Sue to me, sort of a generic plucky hero with a troubled past, to the point where even the "conflict" interactions with other characters (e.g. Cat) seemed contrived.

I'm planning to continue reading the series because I remain interested in the universe, and I'm told that things get better as Gladstone's writing matures.