I received this book as an e-ARC and I am very grateful for the opportunity to do so. With that being said, I am going to be completely honest in this review.

The premise of the book was interesting and definitely had a lot of potential but there were many things that fell short for me. I'm not an advocate for making books longer than they need to be but when it comes to this story it either needed to be longer so that the reader could get a better grasp of everything, or it needed to be written in a different way. Aspects like world-building, relationship progression, and dialogue/sentence formatting needed a lot of work. 

The synopsis for the book says it takes place in the world of another series but reading said series is not required to enjoy this story. As someone who is being introduced to this world with this book, it felt like many things about the world were not established properly at the beginning. It took me too long to really be able to understand the mechanics of the world and a lot of the facts about it did not feel cohesive to me. I read a lot of fantasy and for me, there are really only two ways to connect our world with a fantasy world properly. you can either have it set in our world or place magical things in it as we see in most low-fantasy stories like Percy Jackson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and so on. Or you can make an entirely new fantasy world, choosing to utilize aspects like modern technology or not while still maintaining a distance from our real world. It was very disorienting to have mentions of Shakespeare and places like North Carolina and Australia be settings, and then the land of Westmoreland be where most of the story takes place. I think adding a map would have been incredibly helpful.

The relationship between our MCs felt incredibly fabricated and disingenuous to me. There is a difference between watching the characters develop and fight against the magnetic attraction to one another and being told that the characters have an attraction to one another. We were told about their attraction, but not shown. The characters needed to earn their attraction to one another. 

My other biggest issue was the writing. It is honestly hard for me to properly articulate what was wrong with it but it felt almost janky and not properly thought out. It just wasn't cohesive enough to foster a truly enjoyable reading experience for me. I was almost 50% through the book before I actually started enjoying it and if I hadn't been reading it as an ARC I probably would have DNF'd it. I can't get over the line where she says "Trying to relieve the growing heaviness in my breasts, I flatten my body against his." Like, what?? 

Again I am so grateful that I had the chance to ARC read this book and I'm sorry it just wasn't for me.