Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

I'm going to leave this unrated because I don't fully know how I feel about it.

On the one hand, I loved the magic system, the themes and some of the characters but overall I wanted more darkness from the book. When I'm reading a fantasy dark academia, I expect it to be dark and twisty and brutal from the beginning and this lacked that for me. Additionally, I have realised that I don't enjoy reading about passive characters, particularly in fantasy. Robin changes a lot in the end but especially in the beginning I wanted him to have more of the eye of the tiger. Now this doesn't speak to the overall quality of Robin's character it's just my personal preference. So overall, I realise it might objectively be a good book, it just lacked certain things that make a book in this genre sing for me.