I picked this book up because I heard that it makes for a good standalone audiobook and I was looking for one of those. Also I wanted to read a Naomi Novik book for quite some time. So two birds with one stone, perfect!

First of let's start with the narration by Katy Sobey. I think overall it was good but not great. I think her voice was very good for the story the book was telling and made it very easy to get immersed in it. However I thought her ability to do different and distinct voices is not as good. I felt like it was missing some nuance to clearly make out who was talking at each moment. I also thought that the emotional delivery was a bit lacking but that could also just be me coming from an Andrea Parsneau audiobook recently. 

As for the book itself: Yes, I liked it. It is a pretty cool dark fairytale retelling and it did hook me from pretty early on. I think especially the sense of wonder and mystery as we discover the world through the eyes of our 3 female protagonists is done in an excellent way. Yes it has a slow build up but I liked how we slowly started unraveling all the mysteries.
I found one of the 3 main POVs (Irina) to be a bit tedious at times. I guess she can best be described as this story's "fairytale princess" but I thoroughly enjoyed the other two and I also really enjoyed how dark the story got at certain points.

I thought the ending was very much telegraphed and predictable but you have to give credit to the author to excellently weave all the plot threads together.