In theory, this looked like a book I would usually like a lot.
It looks like a lot of thought was put into the world building, the characters are interesting and don't act like complete idiots, the story looked promising, and yet...
The problem is the writing.
This is an adult-ish contemporary fantasy book, but the writing looks like it belongs in a bad-quality YA.
The tiny chapters, the phrasing, the abruptly ending underdeveloped scenes, the amount of mistakes like missing words and messed up dialogues where the same character would say something and then react to it, the weird one-liners that looks like they would belong in a cheap b-rated movie...
I don't know what irritated me more, the fact that this was kind of supposed to be an adult book where characters are dealing with serious life-and-death problems, but most of the time the characters were more preoccupied with 'feeling badass' ('I marched up to a door and banged on it. The wood shuddered beneath my fist, and I felt pretty badass.' <- places like this made me want to DNF the book) and drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows, or the fact that in every tiny chapter something about the word order and word choices constantly rubbed me the wrong way.
It was impossible to enjoy reading this book because I kept staring at sentences like
'hair had been cut into a fashionable cut'
or
'Their hair was pulled back into a harsh bun, the entire thing giving them an intense and harsh appearance.'
and thinking that 1) the only thing I can see when I read this sentence is a bunch of witches all tied together by their hair, because it was all pulled into a single 'harsh bun'; 2) considering the possible definitions of the word 'harsh', what exactly is a 'harsh bun'?; and 3) 'harsh bun giving harsh appearance' ...you don't say, really?
I think this book really needed a lot more work on construction and editing. Both the writing and the story flow feel coarse, disconnected, and unpolished, and it's a pity because I think that the world and the story could have been interesting if the writing quality wasn't so distracting.