I'm an easy gal. Just give me a smooth slice of life story with sweet little fellas and good food, and I'm sold lol!! This was so freaking cute! From the characters, to the story, to the art? Everything was just lovely 🥹 the dialogues flowed naturally, and the romance was adorbsss

Anyway I might have shed a tear idk................

This was... a painful read. I was SO bored.

The marketing did this book dirty by labeling it as a queer romantasy when it's so freaking far from that 😭 It's a politically heavy YA fantasy with a romance that's not worth mentioning with how minimal it is. The genres are absolutely not balanced at all. The blurb is also misleading in the way that romance is NOT this book's main genre. Genuinely move on if that's what you want to read!!! I was unfortunately baited 😔

The 1/3 of the book was honestly pretty interesting but... The magic was intriguing yet it unfortunately fell short and lacked a little depth. The political schemes were decent until they dragged on for ages. The world building was okay but minimal. The pace and temporality made no sense and were confusing with the amount of time skips. So yeah... that's about it. Elician and Cat are sweet but I didn't care enough about them since their romance is basically non existent yall 😭 they interact so few times that the romantic elements don't feel natural, and rather forced for plot reasons lol

The third main character, Fen, is surprisingly taking more space in the story than the actual two MCs too. Genuinely why? I still don't understand why there are so many chapters with her POV when all these drag the story as much as possible. They brought very little to the plot and felt like fillers.

The other side characters were fine but overall uninteresting and flat, only there to serve the purpose of PNJs for the political plots to move forward 😔

What a disappointing read for me personally 🫩