Mixed to overall positive feelings about this book. I won't be adding it to my physical collection like I was considering, and I had my gripes, but at the end of it all I think its more interesting/compelling than most contemporary lesbian romance and was still worth the read.

My main problem was I felt it just needed more editing—which I'm realizing is a common sentiment I'm having with a lot of recently published books. I would say the first 15-20% felt solid, and it wasn't until after that I started to notice how repetitive and redundant the vocabulary and sentences/sentence structure was, and not in an intentional way, just a "it went unnoticed how just how often this author relied on using this particular set of words" way. I started to get annoyed with how everything was Devastatingly x, everything Shook the main character to her core. It also sometimes started to slip into anachronistic language that felt far too modern for ancient Greek—it was never written to sound "old" to begin with, but even within the tone it set there were occasionally questionable dialogue and vocabulary choices that were jarring and pulled me right out of the scene.

It was especially bad paired with how the book felt like it was floundering in the middle, unsure how to keep tension and will-they-won't-they and resorting to trite misunderstanding tropes where if the MC gave her love interest two extra seconds to speak, their issues would be resolved. I almost thought I was going to DNF at one point, despite starting off so strong.

And yet... And yet!! I ended up eating it up from around 65% onwards. I really didn't want to put it down. In the end I treated it more as a guilty pleasure than anything I'd be particularly wow'd by. Credit where credit is due, as much as the MC pissed me off sometimes, the yearning was solid and written consistently well throughout the book.

In the end I think it's a bit hard to recommend due to its length—I think you could cut 100 pages and it'd only serve to make it more effective—but if you liked Greek mythology growing up (I say that because I can't speak to how well it handles the mythos from what I remember, if there's anything in its reimagining it absolutely butchers or not and I just Don't Know) and want a lesbian romance that has quite an interesting premise surrounding it, I think it's worth a shot. I enjoyed it, it just struggles from really needing some extra editing to be something Really moving and excellent.