Started bad, got better

Rating this book is very hard for me. At the first 80 pages or so, it was unbearable. I could barely get through it. I was just so confused constantly, between the shifting timelines and the footnotes between them. The writing style also didn't help; I definitely thought it very hard to read. However, then I got more into the story, and things definitely got better. Still not great, since I still didn't really like the writing style and the plot felt very unoriginal to me. For some reason I kept thinking about the House of Night series and the similarities it had with that; although the cores of the books were very different, somehow it still felt like a sort of rip-off of that. Maybe it's just fantasy plots that repeat in every single fantasy book. Anyhow, I liked the middle but still wouldn't have taken up the second book. But then I came to the end. There were no more shifting perspectives to confuse me, or footnotes to rip me out of the story. Suddenly the words flowed, whereas towards the beginning it was all just choppy and pasted together. But we were still left with so many questions at the end, especially since so many more were raised. That's why I'm willing to pick up the second book, in the hope that the entirety of that book will be how the middle/end of this one was. Overall I'd probably rate it 3.5 stars, which I would never have thought when I started it.