I started off really loving this book but as it went on, I fell out of love with it...

I really enjoy historical fiction and I was very excited to read this book as historical queer fiction is rare indeed and there is of course now a void to be filled with some magical world building...

That being said, the concept for this story is excellent and it starts out very strong with excellent writing but at around the half way mark you're confronted with, the first of 3 graphic sex scenes, the likes of which you'd find in fan fiction, and that just wasn't what I was looking for with this book.

Excluding the smut and mushy-gushiness, I did enjoy this book but I wish it had more of the world building and developing the interesting magical system/background rather than there being large chunks of detailed sex scenes which don't really add anything to the story that couldn't easily have been done in other ways.