This was decent.
The MC was a little more oblivious than I expected. It took her a long time to seriously question the whole trials – how ridiculous they were. “Oh yeah, sometimes they die, absolutely nothing we can do about it.” eye roll
My other complaint is that this felt like a very long prologue almost – similar to A Court of Thorns and Roses. We spend the whole book waiting for her to realize the “good guys” are actually the “bad guys”. And I suspect in the rest of the series we're going to be on the other side of things now.
It was still pretty enjoyable though and I'll read a sample of book 2 to decide if I want to continue.