Wow this book is a complete and absolut mess.

I had to rant my way through this book to finish it.

The first 30% nothing happens. Nothing. (At least nothing we did not know from the blurb already). The whole book was based on so much foreshadowing,I knew how it would end the first time they mentioned New Orleans. Then you had short phases when you hoped something would happened but then nothing happened again.
The pacing was so off. The way it was told, with the back and forth was utterly exhausting and just threw you out of the story again and again. But worse than all of this (beside having the most shallow point a book of Schwab could have had in the year 2020) were the fucking characters.

Addie:
So she did not want to get married, which is fine. (I hate when they put a 20th century persons mind in historical fiction BUT OKAY I will roll with it). Did she really not have a choice left? Could she not have joined a convent, could she not have run away? If she hated the idea of marriage so much, all she could do was run into the forest and plead with a god? Oh and then, when she ACCEPTED A DEAL knowing that it was a dark god, and she was WARNED before not to do it, she spents 300 YEARS OF BLAMING IT ALL ON THE EVIL THING OF NATURE. That's like blaming the rain for being wet, or blaming a Virus for making people ill. Not once in this book, does she ever halt and for a moment accept that she did this to herself. Yes, yes the evil being is cruel and she suffers, but is it really not her fault. Is there no way for her to ACCEPT and LIVE with it? I was so sick at the end of the not existing character growth, the childish feisty-ness (because being stubborn is cool since 1796