Thank you to the author for access to this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

This romance had your typical formula for making a nice romance, but sadly, the story was not good enough to make me ignore the incoherence of characters and dialogues this book presents. Often times I would be confused as to why the characters would interact in the way they do, bring up unrelated topics while answering targeted questions, do a complete 180 in tone and content of what they were saying, change their stances on some matters for no obvious or justified reason.

Adding to that, the writing style was not to my taste. A lot more tell than show. I think the story would have benefited having a "fated mates" explanation, seeing as the MCs are instantly lusting for each other. It would have make it make more sense why those two people, that apparently are usually very celibate, took to each other so quick and so much.

Finally Summer's mom and Connor being part of the plot felt very weird to me. It seemed pretty obvious they were just here to manufacture some drama in the book which, is fair that a character does that, but it was so obvious, so rushed. They would appear for 5 sentences, just enough time to create a scene, and then leave, without real resolution. Which, to me, means no tension, because if there were real tension, there would be a need for resolution, which there have not been.

In conclusion, I am pretty disappointed at the execution of this story. I did enjoy the world, the braiding, and John's relation with Lev (I'm a little sad we didn't see more of it, but it made sense as they were not the main topic of the book). But I care a lot about character building and that wasn't it for me.

it's like if ace attorney happened in a much cooler city with magic, and there was a lot more action and gore 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️