Sometimes all I have are words and to write them means they are no longer prayers but are now animals. Other people can hunt them.

this collection was written so artfully. the way she describes the death of everything her mother touched, everything in that time period is so haunting and beautiful and like nothing i’ve ever read before. her language is clear yet laden with meaning. i also loved the way she spoke about writing, about hope, and about what death means. she tries to capture and describe something we have never experienced or explored, something we are only touched with in the aftermath. a world we have never visited or experienced, left only with a question mark when our loved ones depart from us. and when it takes us, we will no longer be able to depict what that means, and even this feeling she manages to hold onto long enough to put onto the page.

I was hoping for a Mr. & Mrs. Smith fun rom-com, but what I got was a book I really only finished out of spite. Final Raw Score: 1.3

What This Book Does Well The premise was good - I was genuinely pretty excited about this one. The prose is clean and accessible. Ben, for his part, is functional as a character. We don't get much depth from him, but what we do get is consistent, and the glimpses into his past actions (planting shrubs that attract butterflies under Cybil's window, putting himself in danger to retrieve her father's ring) are sweet details that gesture toward the kind of love story this wanted to be.

Where It Fell Short for Me If you like this author or this book, none of what I’m about to say is a judgment on you or your reading experience. I saw the potential here, but felt very frustrated by its execution.

The romance, which is the entire load-bearing wall of a rom-com, never showed up for me. Multiple times the narrative tells us that there is chemistry between them, but the character's actions and interactions never generated any for me. A romance writer's primary job is to make me feel what the characters feel, and when the text has to say it's there instead, the contract is broken. There are additional issues with the prose that as someone who is far too wordy (clearly) made me wonder if there was a minimum word count the author was aiming for including: “She doubles over in laughter and it’s contagious. I’m laughing too,” and “Your face speaks without words,” and “my traitorous heart flutters like a communist sympathizer.” There are also moments of almost “fan service” including Ben thinking “And I don’t know what it is about girls who read, but it’s incredibly attractive.”

This is a childhood friendship, second chance romance centered around a misunderstanding from 12 years ago. Here is a quote from Cybil's POV about the misunderstanding about 50 pages in, "But then I overheard him. Ben laughing with Rex, saying something stupid. Something careless. 'You think I'm into her? Come on, Rex. She's a mess. Reckless." There are two key issues with this, the word "reckless" continuously gets brought up, but her being reckless wasn't really demonstrated on the page in my opinion, so I found that word choice odd, only to find it's a set up for another line at the end of the book. But more importantly the word "careless". It's been 12 years, so you would think if she was going to carry a grudge this long you would think it would be because it was cruel, or heartbreaking. From her perspective at that moment, she should have no reason to characterize it that way – it feels like authorial intrusion to signal this is just a miscommunication, don’t think poorly of Ben for even one moment, instead of letting the tension work as it should. This miscommunication never really becomes more complex, but miscommunication is the primary engine of conflict for the entire plot, which is a lot of weight for one framing device to carry.

Cybil herself is a stumbling block, and I mean that somewhat literally - she trips, spills, and fumbles her way through scenes as a spy with no training, a career she also stumbled into. However, the woman is so incompetent that she cannot figure out how to purchase appropriate clothing abroad from said repeated spills (a problem I’ve personally solved in countries where I don’t speak the language either) without Ben swooping in to rescue her. Besides being her consistent rescuer, we aren’t really given a reason why Ben would still have feelings for her 12 years later beyond the fact that she is, we are shown repeatedly through male perspectives, attractive.

The side characters are also problematic. One key side character exists almost entirely off page. Another appears briefly and then is dropped until briefly popping back in the ‘epilogue’ final chapter. Ben’s grandmother I believe is meant as a comedic relief, but felt like a caricature. A Russian side character introduced near the end of the book is described specifically by the smell of vodka on his breath – you know, that very unique vodka smell. Oh, vodka is notorious for not having a distinct smell – then how in the world did she know the one Russian side character was drinking vodka… guess we will never know. In the next chapter, the same man is described again for his breath smelling like alcohol as if this is new information. Which makes me wonder if someone in the editing process also noticed the completely unnecessary use of a Russian stereotype.

(Content disclosure: this section mentions harmful portrayals of ADHD and brief mention of a death of a parent)

The element that kept me reading out of sheer spite was the depiction of ADHD through Cybil’s mother – and I say this as someone with ADHD myself. Let me be clear upfront: there is no narrative reason for this character to have ADHD. It contributes nothing to plot. What it does contribute to is a steady, uncomfortable drumbeat of how much Cybil’s life has been derailed by her mother’s condition – which would be a complex and valid thing to explore, except that Cybil’s father also died when she was a child, and somehow that doesn’t make the shortlist for her central wound, unlike her mother’s ADHD.

The ADHD in this narrative is almost entirely about financial mismanagement – which can be a real thing ADHDer struggle with, I’m not disputing that – but the book’s solution is that her mother has been placed in an expensive structured living facility specifically for this. No other conditions or circumstances, just ADHD. This is not a real treatment path at all. But if you are willing to set that aside and follow the narrative’s logic anyway, the internal logical still doesn’t hold up.

Her mother lives in this expensive facility, Cybil covers 2/3 of the cost while drowning in her own debt (including the student loan debt she took on to care for her mother), and yet her mother is still somehow managing her down day-to-day bills including electricity which apparently is not included in the room and board of this expensive living facility. When the electricity company updated their logo, her mother didn’t recognize the charges and flagged them as fraud. So, her bank froze her entire bank account. Her solution is apparently to call Cybil, not the facility staff hired specifically to assist with financial management. Cybil. Who will now volunteer to cover three months of missed electricity payments on top of the 2/3 of the facility costs on top of her own student loan debts – because her mother has ADHD.

Oh, and the “money mismanagement" that landed her mother in the expensive facility in the first place? Later confirmed to be the work of a successful con artist… so it was never ADHD related. Cool. The whole subplot reads less like a writer exploring the potentially complicated relationship between parents and their children and more like unexamined frustration at neurodivergents.

Which leads to me the final major issue with the book, Cybil as the clumsy (literally) Mary Sue. On top of the debt issues with her mother, Cybil stumbled into her spy role without any training from the mysterious spy organization who includes other spies that are so good at their jobs that they train the government agencies. However, she is paid very little for work that is actively putting her life at risk by spying on her boss who is involved in “shady dealings”. Her active contributions to the operation peak at photographing some documents, which she literally stumbles through too. Her one acknowledged flaw is her clumsiness, which is framed as comedic but functions primarily as a reason for Ben to rescue her in almost every chapter.

To make sure no one thinks poorly of her, despite being drowning in debt, the narrative randomly lets us know that Cybil donates her entire 9-5 paycheck from the shady boss to a victims’ advocacy group. The random woman who pays her to spy on her boss calls this her “moral superiority” in what I think was meant as affectionate teasing but read to me like insurance to make sure the audience know just how perfect Cybil is – besides her silly clumsiness of course.

It isn’t until almost the end that we find out why Ben has held onto feelings for her all this time and it’s that she is a strong person and always shows up for others even when she is hurting. That’s a genuinely lovely sentiment, but it also describes a version of Cybil that exists almost entirely in the backstory we are told about and all of it happens during the 12 years they have been apart. What we are shown since their reunion is that she is beautiful (and other men also notice how beautiful she is) and that she falls down a lot and she needs someone to rescue her. Yes, she literally thinks at points in the book that she needs Ben to come rescue her. So even though it’s a life-or-death spy mission, she needs Ben to save her because she can’t manage to buy a work appropriate outfit on her own. Don’t fret – he not only saves her when she buys an expensive tracksuit instead of work appropriate clothes, he also had already bought her a beautiful work-to-evening appropriate black dress that she didn’t know about.

Final Thoughts & Opinions Clearly, this book frustrated me. There is more I could say, but I don’t want to have to think about this book anymore. I have been recommended The Gallagher Girls Series by Ally Carter from the premise, so if you are interested in this vibe, that might be one to check out.

My thanks to NetGalley and Thomas Nelson for the complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.

Star Rating Breakdown Personal Enjoyment: 1 Overall Execution: 1.5 Writing Craft & Quality: 1.5 Characters: 1 Plot: 1.5 Final Raw Score: 1.3