I tried. I really tried. But this book cannot hold my focus at all so I have to give up.

On paper it looked good. This book should've hit the spot for me with a historical setting, vampires, theater, the vibe of Interview with the Vampire. It was all there. But it never delivered. This book is so painfully slow, I move faster going backwards.

Since I was handed an ARC for the audiobook and I DNFed this at 21% I will not review the book itself beyond that but instead focus on the audio aspect. The narration itself was okay, I guess. I like that the narrator doesn't completely butcher the french and italian parts (for there are plenty and having to listen to someone mangle that would be an absolute travesty). But the narration is otherwise pretty flat. There are a lot of characters running around and judging from the words said they all have very different personalities. Which you wouldn't know going by the voice acting alone. I don't even know just how many characters there are, because the narration makes them all sound the same. Which makes a book filled to the brim with dense purple prose even harder to follow.

I really wanted to love this but I find myself unable to. But even then, I usually try to finish my ARCs since they were provided to me free of charge in exchange for a simple review. If I were to trudge through this book any further, I fear I'd lose my willingness to pick up a book any time soon. I don't want to put myself in a reading slump, so I'm drawing the line here.

If you are in for the purplest of prose and the slowest of paces, go for it. But I cannot seem to stomach it.

DNF at 33% (that's right after finishing the first story "Wet Hot Allosaurus Summer")

I truly do not know what to say. I have read a lot of strange and not well executed erotica before but this... this is lowkey an insult to dinosaur fans. This is just bad. And I hate to say that, given that I was handed a free ARC for review of this omnibus edition. I only made it through the first of three stories in this thing (Wet hot Allosaurus Summer) and I skimmed that for the most part.

The writing? Not good. The plot? Nonsensical (derogatory). The romance? Nowhere to be found. The smut? You would think sex with a dinosaur would be a creative endeavor but not in this story. I understand if you're not creative enough to come up with a fantastical phallus for a dinosaur but at least make the smut interesting? If these two characters were human, it would still be bad smut.

I thank the publisher for the opportunity to read this for the low price of a review, but that was about the best part of this whole thing. As a smut reader I am disappointed. As a dinosaur fan, I am insulted. There is only so much suspension of disbelief I can muster, you know?

made it half way through and am not invested in anything. Setting, Characters, Story, nothing is gripping me.