thank you netgalley and the publisher for giving me a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.

Lina is a trained assassin who is now working under the claws of the man and gang who killed her family under the threat of hurting her little sister Eunbi. One day she is tasked to steal a tapestry who turns out belongs to the pied piper. Turns out Pied piper is angry at her for doing so and besides kidnapping her boss ( whom now she has to rescue if she doesnt want the gang to come for her little sister) she has now striken a bargain with him. Kill him within 14 days and she will be free or fail to do so and die.

The premise alone was enough to make me interested. It had kdrama vibes and tbh enemies to lovers in fantasy?? we love them. Being honest i struggled a bit at the beginning. I didnt know how the story or the plot were going to go but what Sophie Kim did was introduce us slowly into the world and Korean Folklore.
Lina as a character confused me at times. She is THE REAPER yet she is so trusting of everyone. The n i remmeber her backstory and i can see someone that what truly wants is to not be alone and her trusting everyone makes sense. She just wants to find friends. She was strong yet vulnerable she felt real and complex. This is personal but i dont like the I am strong and indepenant and nothing can kill me i am a bad bitch vibe some books have. I want badassness with feelings and Sophie delivered that exactly.

Rui, i though he was too much like other male characters at first. At some point i though wow the author likes enemies to lovers and is kinda following the blueprint of male characters. We didnt get to know him until later and i am grateful. We knew him at the same pace as Lina did and we could understand him and his actions better and feel more conected to Lina.

What i found lacking about characters was how little description were there about the side characters. They appear yet they feel only ornamental like they are only there just as not to have only 2 characters in the novel. I didnt need them to have like a 100 page arc but i needed more than to know their name and a description of their hair at the beginning.

There were so many 5 star scenes yet i can only give it 4 stars based on how i struggled at the beggining and the underdeveloped side characters. not mentioning how it felt like the author chose 2 plot devices and then she separated them . One thing happens now and the other will happen on the following book. Felt a little anticlimatic

I think this year either I really like the first book of the series (this book, The Stardust Thief, The Girl from the Well) or I dislike it/dnf it (Lightlark, The School for Good and Evil). Luckily, this definitely wasn’t the case with this book. I went in expecting an interesting plot and characters. What I got was something much more. A fascinating, intriguing plot, rich world-building, and compelling characters.

I liked that it had a bit of a retelling and I really liked that the book was inspired by Korean mythology. I liked that I had to look up what different terms meant (or that I sometimes didn’t have to because context clues were enough). Though I had an audio copy so I looked at others’ reviews for the spelling first. Next time I’ll definitely read a physical/ebook version so I know how to say and spell the words (because I’m not familiar with them).

Lina, being the main character, was well-written and lively, and fun to follow. She loves her sister, Eunbi, so much that she’s literally willing to try to kill a Dokkaebi Emperor – a powerful spirit in Korean mythology. When she speaks of her sister, it’s of love and affection and you can understand her reason for doing all this. You want her to complete the task because it means she’ll see her sister again. There’s a bit of chronic pain representation in the book because Lina’s left leg is damaged from a (knife) injury, and I’m guessing nerve damage too, by the sound of it. The pain she felt when she landed wrong or fell and hurt her leg – I felt that all throughout – in fact I think my legs were also reading the book and wanted to join in.

At first I thought it was another immortal falls for the 17-20 girl (Lina’s 18 or 19) book – but turns out that Dokkaebi age much slower than humans – so he’s technically twenty, and also centuries old