(Warning for spoilers)

First I'll start with what I liked:

But sadly there were some issues that kept me from fully enjoying Iron Widow. 

The worldbuilding feels... flat at times. To the point that when the climax happens, I didn't get a sense of urgency about what was in stake. And the reveal/plot twist at the end... While kinda predictable, it wasn't foreshadowed enough to be justified. The prose doesn't help much in this matter either, but as I understand this is the first book of the author and the first of a series overall so maybe these details will be more polished later on. 

But the biggest issue to me is that for a book where the MC's motivation is avenging and protecting women there isn't much bonding between women or much pondering from the protagonist about sorority or the small ways in which women connect and help each other while brutally oppressed. Zetian is fighting for women, but we don't see much of her advocacy on a one-on-one level. 

We understand it's a heavily male dominated society where women have a lot of internalized misogyny but surely Zetian can't be the only feminist in the entire universe, and surely she didn't go her entire life without bonding with other women outside the ones in her family and thus giving her more reason to want to avenge the concubines and consorts. 

Concubines and consorts that, to make matters worse, remain as an anonymous, gullible mass— Except for the ones on Zetian's power level, and even then they remain mostly antagonistic towards her.

The male pilots and the pilot system overall doesn't care for the girls they sacrifice so it makes sense that they don't care for their names or faces, but the book (written from Zetian's perspective) not providing anything beyond the usual "There's a mecha battle going on and more girls are dying and that makes me mad" line for them and not caring to show some individual stories for these girls feels even more dehumanizing, even condescending. 

All these pitfalls make Zetian's rebellion feel like a one-woman fight instead of a communal one. At first I put it down as a flaw of Zetian's character but as the book went on I started to believe it's more up to poor development. Just, overall her feminism felt very.... entry level.

I REALLY hope I'm wrong for future books though, because it really threw me off a book I'd otherwise liked a lot.