I think I would have loved this more if it had been focused on fewer characters or longer. Having so many points of view in such a short book can be a bit disjointed. Certainly still a very powerful story.

God, I was so bored reading this. These characters and this plot are literally just puffs of air blown onto over-tired tropes and plot cliches. There was NOTHING unique about this story.

Nothing more than a BookTok wet dream.

This book was... underwhelming. After Good Spirits, I expected this to be another phenomenal, un-put-down-able read. But it wasn't. This was the first B.K. Borison book that didn't make me think wow immediately upon finishing it. Admittedly, all of her works that I've read have set an astronomically high bar for her. But this simply didn't work for me.

The romance was okay. I liked both Gabriel and Darcy individually, but the insta-lust to enemies (?) to lovers didn't work. There were scenes that were super hot, there were scenes that were very emotional, but almost none of it made me feel the romance. It just didn't leap off the page and come alive for me.

I think part of the issue regarding the romance is the marketing scheme for this book. Already, there is an extravagant amount of hype for this story. Good Spirits and the Heartstrings novels are fantastic. Again, they've set a very high bar for B.K. Borison (in my opinion). But the marketing strategy on social media has been to take the hottest and most impactful quotes from the MMC and... spoil them.

Granted, the quotes are out of context. But, as I read the book, everything felt diluted. I already knew what Gabriel would say. The impact was dulled by the exposure of the quotes. Several of them are cliche or tropey, but I don't think that dampens the experience when you know you're reading a romance. I just wish I could have felt some of the gut punches or unexpected flutters that come with reading this novel.

Additionally, I thought the plot was very predictable. I'm going to do my best to keep this spoiler free. When this book centered around grief and death, I went in expecting a theme of restoration. The foreshadowing in this book is very heavy-handed. At times, it reached a level that felt more on-par with a YA novel (not that that's a bad thing). But it did spoil the ending for me by chapter 5. I wasn't surprised by anything that happened, which was just another disappointment.

Would I read this book again? Sure. I thought it was good. It'll be a fun thing to read in the fall in the future. It just wasn't as special as her previous works. I wonder if a tighter publishing schedule might have impacted the final quality of this piece.