DNF 12% If you think salt is enough seasoning and black pepper is spicy, then you might like this book. This is every romantasy phrase regurgitated and rebundled into an unimaginative and uninteresting setting with a dull cast of characters. It’s all “soft, pale skin” and “eyes like storms”. It’s a forced enemies to lovers when they didn’t need to be enemies in the first place if they just talked. The female main character is so incredibly Mary Sue but for some reason needs to spend 50 pages explaining to the reader how much of a badass she is instead of showing them. It makes her look more like a try hard than someone I want to root for. This book is 85% back stories and flash backs and 15% current events (at least from the bit I read). Why are you dropping this amount of information and backstories on people I don’t have a reason to care about yet? Pare this shit down, Miss Sheila. Let’s not forget how boring and uncreative the names of locations and people feel. Like I don’t need places to have bizarre names but these? Fallen Hold, South Hold, Southwest Hold, Mountain Haven. Babe, season this even just a little bit. Surely, we can do better than this. There is also no creative rhythm or tone to the writing whatsoever. There’s hardly any imagery or metaphors that you can really bite into. BUT WAIT. THERE’S MORE!! My biggest gripe of the book is spoilers ⬇️ . . . . . . From the synopsis, you should know that the FMC, Harlow, has a magic power that her kisses are poisonous. So her nightlife consists of playing vigilante and taking out dangerous, evil men. Within the beginning, she meets a client who was supposedly physically beaten by her husband. Said husband also abuses their children. Harlow, believing this, goes to seek out the man to murder him. Upon baring her cleavage and seducing him with her feminine wiles, she follows him into a private room where she kisses him. Only he doesn’t die within 5 seconds and for once in Harlow’s life she’s able to experience kissing. She believes she’s making out and grinding on a WIFE BEATER. Bitch, I’m 28 and I’ve never been kissed either but you would have to threaten to run over my cat before I would make out with a man that beats his wife. I don’t care that it isn’t the truth. Horndog Harlow assumed it was at the time.

No part of the first 12% of the book was enjoyably literature and yet it has such high ratings and is a New York Times bestseller. I guess I should really get to publishing something if this is what passes for hood book these days. 😮‍💨

Also could audiobook readers just relax their voices and talk normally?