I really hated the use of footnotes, I gave up reading them because they were so boring and took you out of the actual story. The book is incredibly long and nothing really happens for the first 800 pages. None of the female characters have any agency or personality. The only interesting people where the gentleman with the thistledown hair, Childermass and Stephen Black and none of them get enough page time. 
I did enjoy the Napoleonic was section but this was mainly because Strange was with the 95th Rifles and I'd seen enough Sharpe for this to allow me to write fan fiction in my mind!