This so easily could have been a 5-star read for me, and in fact it was up until that choice of ending. It's hard to reconcile such phenomenal world building and a gripping plot with an ending that I absolutely hated. Pretty much every thread was left unresolved and not in a satisfactory way - it almost felt more like the book had to stay under a certain page count and things stopped mid-story. This was marketed as a standalone, but it either needed to be a duology or have more elements wrapped up. Whether endings are happy, sad, neat and tidy, or ambiguous they need to leave the reader with some feeling of satisfaction and that was just missing for me.