Anyone who reads my reviews knows I have a love/hate relationship with Haley Cass's work. My main complaint has always been that she refuses to hire an editor and proofreader. She's one of the most popular indie-published sapphic authors and doesn't seem to care one bit about the actual quality of her work that she's making money off of. She's an absolutely fantastic storyteller but not a good technical writer with punctuation and grammar issues that are so heavy, it makes it difficult to read and comprehend. For some people, clearly, this is not an issue. For me, it's THE issue.

When I saw that she signed with Atria for this newest book, I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to see what Cass's work would look like with an editor and proofreader. The results: much better but still needs at least one or two more passes. I'll explain...

The commas have been mostly wrangled. The punctuation is MUCH better. Not perfect but I only got confused while reading a few times as opposed to constantly irritated by having to reread sentences. That was the biggest change I saw. The book was still incredibly bloated with adjectives - sometimes several strung together - that if they had been cut back to an appropriate level, a few dozen pages could have been eliminated from this huge book. And for the love of god, please just use "said" instead of the, what may have been, hundreds of other adjectives. Dialogue tags should fade into the background so we don't get pulled out of the conversation. And for the love of all things holy, stop using murmured. Apparently Whitney can only murmur when speaking. Poor Whitney.

Besides the at least 100 pages of filler (insane amount of adjectives and adverbs, excessive dialog tags, getting a main character's name wrong in one, possibly two (it was convoluted and I couldn't figure it out) places), I loved the characters. No one can say that Cass can't bring the emotion. In fact, her characters and the emotion she pulls from them is what makes her a great storyteller. And I hope this book has gotten one or two more editorial passes before it's published because it has the potential to be the best book she's ever written.

I hope she's able to stick with the publishing house because it can only continue to improve her skills and get us better books to read.

Thanks to Atria and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read the ARC.