The worldbuilding is fabulous: everything takes place within a small country carved out amongst empires that stands alone as a safe haven for both witches and shapeshifters, who the book refers to as familiars. The Cursed Kingdom is nearly always at war with one neighboring country or another, and over the course of the book the main character, Rosy, has to reckon with how her personal resistance to the next war on the horizon does and does not effect the people around her.
She attends a boarding school that only recently began admitting familiars and gains social clout through her relationship with the country's princess, but doesn't know how to use it and isn't particularly interested in doing so. Her resistance is small-scale, but based on the (somewhat cliffhanger-y) ending I expect the sequel will dive more into this.
See you all next month. Fingers crossed it's a little less... everything.