I really enjoyed Bakker's first installment on his Second Apocalypse series.
Specially its writing, setting and world building.

I'll be honest: Bakker's writing style made reading this book a breeze. This is subjective of course but the balance between his flowery and simple style was handled perfectly.
On top of this writing style you add a really interesting setting filled with superb world building and it makes for a great read.

I'll comment briefly on the characters. Bluntly, most if not all of them are pieces of shit. Now... this normally would lead to having unlikable characters but I don't think that's the case here. While I wouldn't necessarily say that the characters present in this book are "likeable", they ARE charismatic and all of the main ones serve a purpose for the story, for displaying a specific view of this world.
Not only the characters enhance and take part in the world building in a beautifully written way, but their internal conflicts and interactions with each other are superb too.
Achamian, Cnaiur, Kellhus, Esmenet, Conphas and Proyas are all really interesting and distinct POV's.

Lastly I have to mention that this book is DARK. Women are handled horribly in this world and it sure does make reading this book uncomfortable a lot of times, but I think it's handled kind of tactfully... I guess? Or rather not disrespectfully... I think that's better wording. Of course it's difficult to tell and I'd totally understand if someone were to drop this book because of it but I, personally, didn't think it was purposefully disrespectful towards women. It just showcased a dark, patriarchal world where women are treated horribly but in no way was it glorified.

Ok that's it for this review/rambling.

I think I'm gonna go for a 8/10 or 4-star rating because the potential of this series is so great that I'm intrigued to see how much better it WILL get.

EDIT: in the course of writing this review I decided on a 9/10 and 5-star rating to better reflect how much I like this book, so that's that.