Why is everyone ranting and raving about how good this book is? And before you say I'm a hater, please read all my points.

First off, this book should've been two books, not two parts of the same book. The first book should've ended when

Violet is captured with the journal.

That should be the end of the first book, this book has massive pacing issues as a result, things that should have been expanded on are rushed and things that don't need expanded on are given multiple chapters. It feels like the author and the publisher were in a rush to ride the hype train and skipped over multiple needed edits and rewrites. 

The book suffers from second book curse/syndrome and it never makes an attempt to get out due to all the world-building being in dialogue. Yarros spends the entire time telling us, when she should be showing us her worldbuilding via exposition. That's what exposition is there for, but the most we get is the little blurbs at the start of each chapter that are maybe a sentence long. She had a whole book to address how Brennan faked his death and came to Aretia but it is never addressed. Yarros has a good 20 pages or more to explain what Andarna is but nope gotta gloss over that as well. And for goodness sakes this book is literally set at TWO schools. That is the BEST setting for at least faking like you can worldbuild (see Harry Potter) but nope, most classroom scenes are fade to black. 

And are we gonna talk about how the previous book has almost no consequence to this one?

Especially with the return of Jack Barlowe?

I'm just so over this, I'm known as a speed reader at work, but it should not take me a month to work through a second book even if it suffers from the curse. With everything around the book which I'm not even gonna get into on top of this subpar writing, it really makes me want to DNF the whole series.