Pure ridiculousness but the spice was decent 🤷🏼‍♀️

Adorable, fluffy, cozy, heartwarming little holiday romance. The banter was fantastic and never cringey, the romance believable and sweet, the side characters awesome. I’m only downgrading because of the third act breakup which I hate, but honestly, I still love this book.

DNF @ 24%. I’m so massively annoyed at the insipidity and the inane bickering that I can’t find literally anything likable about this book rn. Maybe it’s a me problem just at this time, but I have to stop here for my own mental health.

Stop it this book was freaking adorable. Perfect? Probably not, but perfect for me in this moment. I ate this up with a spoon. Had all the feels, all the laughs, all the best side characters.

It's gonna be a hard pass from me. Should've DNF'ed when I was cringing and rolling my eyes all through the beginning, but I kept waiting for the earth-shattering beautiful family romcom vibes to come through. They didn't. The characters all acted like they were about 21, not late 30s early 40s, the conflicts were so stupidly manufactured, the dialogue cringey to the absolute max. I'm not out here looking for a Pulitzer prize winner in a frickin Christmas romance novel, but I am asking to not cringe into oblivion while reading it. Didn't seem like a huge ask, but with this one, apparently it is.

Gonna be entirely honest here: I was bored af the entire time. I just didn't connect to the characters, the story, or the world, everything felt so shallow and insipid. I probably should've just DNF'ed, but I really thought it would get better but it never really did. All tell and no show, means no emotional connection for me. In the end, I just didn't care.

LOVE this cozy Christmas read. It has so much more emotion behind the main romantic arc that I was simply not expecting, and maybe because of that surprise or maybe I'm just vulnerable after reading a devastating fantasy series, but I cried my way through this whole thing. I'm just a sucker for a character who keeps trying to be useful to others because they feel that's the only way they can be loved and appreciated, only to fail and realize they were worthy of love just for existing all along. It gets me every. freaking. time. The romantic connection with Nolan did happen extremely fast, but these were two bone-deep lonely people finally having a human connection in years. I can overlook it. The only thing I can really say I wished was different was the relationship with the sister--she never really apologized for her part in Harriet's horrific upbringing and almost tried to gaslight her back into thinking her treatment was deserved because she was so "rebellious" and yet it was framed as an apology/forgiveness/restart conversation. Blegh. I would have rather she stayed a jerk than that half-assed whatever. But otherwise, perfection.

Really cute, really cozy, really, REALLY annoying at times.

I loved BK Borison's writing in Good Spirits so much that I decided to bump this one to the top of my Christmas TBR, and I'm kinda regretting that decision now a little bit. While this book was enjoyable and I did finish it in a day, there were parts that were just too far-fetched and eyeroll-worthy even for me, Stella being chief among them. She just got on my effing nerves the entire time, and then that third act breakup that didn't even need to be? The miscommunication of nearly a decade??? No thank you.

But still. The writing was emotional and immersive as always, and I felt attached to almost all the other characters. Happy I read it, just a little disappointed in how some of it played out.

Perfect holiday romance vibes. Perfect banter, never felt forced or unnatural, and it was genuinely hilarious. Were parts cringe? Ofc it’s a Christmas book. Did parts, one in the particular, make me roll my eyes? Ofc it’s a contemporary romance. But damn if this wasn’t exactly what I wanted to read this holiday season.

Great Value Rhysand and Dollar General Tamlin but make them werewolves and totally obsessed with cardboard cutout with "BRAT" as her only personality trait, Bargain Basement Feyre. No one had any actual personality or character, barring a hint in Great Value Rhysand, and Bargain Basement Feyre was one of the most infuriatingly insipid heroines I've had the displeasure to read about in years. I should've DNF'ed in the very beginning when I realized this book was just beat-for-beat copying the tropes that made ACOTAR successful, as if that were all that goes in to writing a book, and spelling out every plot point like the author thinks we're as stupid as the story she's telling. And the repetition!!!! I rebuke it in the name of Jesus. This shit is what's destroying the fantasy romance genre as a whole, and it's why the genre is being looked at as little more than corn. AND THE SPICE WASN'T EVEN GOOD.

I went into this book almost totally blind. Knew nothing about it other than that it was written by Jay Kristoff (loved his work in Illuminae) and that my own little book club friends adored this series. The beginning had me almost totally bewildered, not by the world-building or the characters, but by the point of it all--if the main character is already captured by the enemy, the last of his kind in this war against vampires and eternal night, then clearly we've lost? Why am I reading this? Then it clicked. This story isn't for the faint of heart. It's brutal, bleak, bloody, grimdark at its most grim and most dark; a story about the absolute worst a person can live through and still survive, the total loss of faith and disillusionment in everything you've worked for your entire life. But it's so fucking good. I'm so mad I didn't read these sooner, but at least now I can binge them right through to the end.

I... really don't know how I feel about this one. It was good enough, don't get me wrong, but after the first one, I just wanted something else, something more. Everything felt so rushed, unexplained, surface-level, and even downright childish in this. The characters, particularly Ren, took a massive step back in terms of intelligence, though Jaeil was a huge saving grace even if his romance was also massively rushed. The politics were politicing, but I can't say they were intriguing--there was absolutely no depth to this supposed war, the people fighting it, the innocent civilians harmed in it, etc. It was like reading a third grader's report of a historical conflict--emotionless, disconnected, disjointed, and even nonsensical at times. Still, I could forgive all of this because of the vibes, except for how twee and absolutely warp-speed that ending was. Talk about rushing through a conflict, I feel like I blinked and missed everything. Suddenly we're all hunkydory living in the sky!

All that to say, I did still mostly enjoy this. It's by far not the worst sequel I've ever read. I just feel like it could have benefited from a few more rounds of editing.