this is yet another assholes-to-lovers story where lust conquers all (their antagonism) and the guy is the (much) bigger asshole as per usual. but don't worry, his assholery will be excused by way of his insomnia, his martyr-like restraint in not jumping a hot girl the second she openly expresses her interest in him, and his tortured musician/fuckboy persona. he's been having writer's block for a year, you see. naturally his temper is on a short fuse because of that.

i'm probably being a little unfair here, but no words in this language can properly express just how little i care about wyatt's moaning about how women always fall for him, but he's incapable of loving them back the way he deserves, and how he doesn't want to break blake the same way. women aren't that fragile. they are, in fact, capable of surviving without your magical cock. and anyway, he already rejected her once when he left her high and dry on a kitchen countertop after a midnight fondling session during a family reunion. she's clearly survived that just fine.

it also really pisses me off how he insulted both blake and a stranger in really petty ways due to his refusal to admit to his jealousy and, in blake's case, crossed multiple lines he shouldn't even have been near in the process. i especially hate how this jealousy mainly manifests in him thinking about blake fucking another guy. these people think about practically nothing but sex, and lust, and how much they want to see each other's genitalia. they think about it so much, in fact, that they fuck each other on every available surface, including in the family vacation house their entire extended family is coming to stay in (and also while said family is already there. yikes). maybe it's because i'm too asexual for this, but surely there's more to your attraction to each other than just physical lust. wyatt is the worse offender of this by far too, because elle kennedy believes in a type of gender essentialism that casts men as insatiable horndogs, whereas blake at least occasionally thinks about how she likes wyatt because of how contradictory and mysterious he is. whatever.

speaking of which, the misogyny in this book is practically dripping off the pages. as mentioned above, there is a shocking amount of gender essentialism in this book. wyatt's internal monologue, in particular, is horrendous to read for this reason. it's either "i'm a guy, so obviously my inner horndog is gonna perk up when a girl makes her interest known" or "we stayed up all night to have a deep conversation and that means something to girls that us guys just don't care about. she's probably designing the wedding invitations [right now]" (the last sentence is an actual quote btw). it's exhausting to have to read such gallingly heteronormative takes on gender. another example of this is when blake hears about her friend's girlfriend cheating on him and wonders "[w]hy are men so blind when it comes to toxic women?" darling, your own boyfriend cheated on you for an entire year and filmed sex tapes the entire time to commemorate it, and you didn't realise until it made national news. i think it goes both ways.

but wait! this is not even the worst this book has to offer. the absolute worst part of this book, in my humble opinion, is blake's pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, which is in effect only there to lay the groundwork for their third-act break-up and conflict. yeah. you heard that right. i hate the pregnancy trope as much as the next person, but there's something particularly appalling about the way elle kennedy uses it here. miscarriage is a serious matter. it should not be bandied about as loosely as it is here, where the sole purpose of its depiction is simply to set up yet another tiresome romance trope. it is simply horrifying to me that no one thought to bring this up in the publishing process. this is a consistent problem, because there are plenty of other lines that should've been cut before this book hit the shelves. for instance, blake thinks to herself halfway through the novel: "For the first time in my life, the word freckles doesn’t feel like a slur." in what fucking world can the word freckles ever be likened to a slur? how did no one in the editing and publishing team notice this? i have so many questions about this book, but i doubt any of them will ever get a satisfactory answer.

anyway, my problems with this book don't stop with the set-up of their romance, but with the set-up of a future book in the series, in which another character cuckolds his best friend (again, in the family vacation house). i presume readers are eventually meant to forgive him for this drunken "mistake," because blake and wyatt sure dismiss this easily enough, and so does every other member of their extended family (except the best friend, of course, who goes right back to his fuckboy ways). unfortunately, i am of the opinion that this is unforgivable, and i'm not sure how blake managed to ignore it given her own experience with cheating assholes. on a slightly different note, i am concerned about elle kennedy's knowledge of global geography; i'm not sure she's aware that tokyo is not, in fact, in south korea. or perhaps she simply doesn't realise that the k in k-pop stands for korean. yet another question i'll never have answered.

thank you to Tor for access to this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

1.5 stars.

technically speaking, this book had its moments. the prose could be well written and there was some good imagery. i cannot say the same for everything else.

this book follows Thena, an american woman who gets transported to the orc world of Korule by Viggo, a high chieftain.

Thena swears and makes references to 80s media a lot. like, a lot, a lot. it makes her stand out as a character in a foreign world, which is nice. however, there’s not much confusion from the orcs when it comes to her slew of Earth media and swear words. they just seem to accept it as normal. there’s not much inquiry or curiosity coming from them.

on the flip side, Thena is starved for information about Korule. she’s constantly asking questions and trying to figure out what’s going on. it just makes the world building feel lacking, like it doesn’t have much of a backbone to it if someone from another world can just jump in and be accepted immediately.

another issue i’ve had throughout the book is the way Thena’s panic disorder was treated. it’s implied that she has a lot of internalized shame and stigma regarding her panic disorder, and it is implied multiple times that bonding with Viggo would “fix” it in a way. this not only dismisses the work Thena herself has done up to this point, but it treats panic disorder as something that needs someone else to remedy rather than something that is managed with time and effort.

the sex scenes were explicit but uninspiring.

overall, this book was not for me. but fans of ACOTAR might enjoy it more.