This book sounded like it had a neat premise, but unfortunately it did not live up to that promise in several ways. If this had not been an ARC, I would have stopped reading after a couple chapters; however, once the plot finally picked up about 2/3 through I did speed through to the end pretty quickly. Pacing was therefore a bit off, but my main issue with the book was the characters - I hated them. All of them. They were all horrible people, and honestly by the end I was rooting for the demon to kill them all.
Title - First of all, the title is misleading. I saw the title and thought "Oh cool, this'll be a book about a witch accidentally or on purpose summoning a demon." NOPE. It's not about that at all, and if you spend the entire book waiting for that to happen, like I did, you'll be sorely disappointed.
Characters - Horrible, terrible, no good, very bad people. Maybe you like books about selfish assholes who alienate everyone around them? If so, you'll love this. I do not. Every time any character spoke, I wanted to punch them in the face. Seraphina in theory has a growth arc and realizes she was being a jerk, but it's not really well fleshed out. She just goes from "no I don't need anyone" to "I love you forgive me and help me" in 10 seconds flat. None of the other characters ever seem to realize they were being asshats the whole time. It is a series, though, so maybe they do that in later books.
Worldbuilding - There's very little new or unique here, it's sort of a mashup of all the most common and trite Christian monster myths. I did not appreciate the addition of religion to the mix halfway through. Many of the rules/ways of the world are confusing throughout the book - for example, the issue of mages is a major plot point, yet we never really learn what they actually are and whether Seraphina's opinion of them is accurate or wildly off-base. Understanding that point would help us know which characters were being idiots at various points in the story, but since we never find out we're just left feeling like all the characters suck even more than they already do.
Writing - There was nothing specifically wrong with the writing, but the style did not add to the story in any way. Namely, the style is very action-oriented (almost all the sentences are Person did X, Person did Y), which left the internal conflict that set up the story feeling very meaningless and neglected. We see that Seraphina is always angry. We know the surface-level reasons why, because she yells about it every time she opens her mouth. But we don't really get to understand the complexity of her emotions (if any complexity exists) because the narration is so focused on her clenching her fists and crying in rage. As a result, she feels very one-dimensional and her frustration and anger just get boring fast.
Pacing - This was quite off. The story starts off veryyyy slowly. We don't even meet the demon until 2/3 of the way through the book. That was when I felt like the story actually began. The set-up is also quite redundant in a lot of places. Do we really need to see Seraphina lose her temper in a jealous rage 20 times? No. There was also an imbalance to the reveal of information - we get drips and drabs for the first 2/3 of the book, then an avalanche of infodumps for several chapters. And worse, the infodumps actually contradicted much of the lore we had been imparted the first 2/3 of the book, because Seraphina herself is misled and we're in her head. That would normally be a perfectly fine twist, but it doesn't work in this story for a couple reasons. The author is trying to establish a mildly creepy vibe, but Seraphina's initial misinformation is that demons and monsters don't exist. First, we already know demons exist because of the title, so we aren't likely to fall for this misbelief setup. Second, it's not creepy if we believe Seraphina's misinformation. And third, if Seraphina really believes her own misinformation, then her actions don't make much sense - she's clearly freaked out by the things happening, so claiming not to believe in demons while at the same time fleeing a dare to summon them is just confusing to the reader.
Plot - Eh, it's been done before, and way better. The mysteries and twists were not well done, I always knew what was going on. There was quite a bit of sleight of hand to set up a lot of the "twists," which did not make for satisfying explanations. Some of them did not make sense given some of the magic rules we were told (e.g. why the spell didn't work for Seraphina the first time... that person should not have been able to touch that specific item). I did get a little interested at the end to find out what was happening, but ended up feeling very dissatisfied because the pieces of the story did not fit neatly together - instead all the loose ends were just sort of hand-waved away.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.