For me, the most compelling part of the book wasn't the existence and secrecy of magic itself, but the lack of acceptance around it. While normally the world of a book having magic isn't something too impressive. The way that this book had magic exist but villanized by the general public was a unique twist that I don't normally see and I was really intrigued to see how it turned out.
The one thing I could say is that there was a bit much exposition - you have to go 50 pages into the book before you even beet the only character given a name in the synopsis. I was initially very confused on that - at first, I thought someone made a mistake and put the wrong synopsis on the book by mistake.