I try not to read books when they have a lot attention from the book community— both good and bad in most cases— just because I want to make up my own mind about books without a lot of outside influences first. But I was looking for a faster pace audiobook and this one was available. I tried to avoid watching videos about people talking about it but on the positive side I did hear a few people describing it as the new ACOTAR in terms of enjoyability, expected popularity, and probably spice too. On the negative side, I’ve heard criticism about how she handled POC. Like she included them but made no mention of how race fits into the world. Which may not seem like a big deal especially as it’s fantasy and not our world, but as the one creator I saw about it said, not including it in the world building it has the feeling of “it’s a utopia where all POC have assimilated into a single white/western culture” which is problematic. I feel like it would have been better to either make it clear that this is a world in which race never factored much into culture and instead culture is based almost exclusively on nationality (as nationality is  already established to be important to the storyline) or to include the ways in which race does factor into culture, even if this world is handling racism better than ours is. 

The writing was alright even if there were some occasionally weird modern sounding phrases mixed in. I felt like the characters could have been fleshed out more and I do tend to prefer a slow burn romance, but that being said, I did enjoy the book. It was a fun world and an entertaining read.