Check out a video review of this book here.

Why you may like this book: You love enemies to lovers sooooo much that all that matters to you is that you have a tall white, old magic man wearing dark colors and a barely-an-adult woman he inexplicably falls for. Both of those things are definitely here.

Why I hated this book: There was absolutely no portion of this that made a lick of sense.

First, this sets up a mystery as the plot center and then proceeds to do all my least favorite things in a mystery. It relies very heavily on both miscommunication and the withholding of information. Our main characters spends the majority of this book just running around asking people things and everyone just dodges her questions for, uh, reasons and, um, because. It also creates this situation where our main character takes the crumbs of information she gathers and just jumps to the stupidest conclusions. I other complaints about the bland MC, but the fact that the reader is always like 15 steps ahead of her was so damn annoying. She was inept and it created an unpleasant reading experience.

This also fed into some vague, nonsensical world building. You have to suspend a lot of disbelief in order to buy into the fact that our MC was a whole adult who was just asking these very obvious questions about her world. The worst part is that she's asking all these questions all book long that she barely gets answers to, so it creates all this patchy world building and plot holes that are just left open. And not in a "wow I'm curious to find out in the next book!" way, but in a "nothing you've presented actually makes sense" way. If you paid me $1,000,000, I would not be able to explain the magic in this world and how it was used. The only thing I can even tell you about this world is "...Italy?" I have no concept of who has magic and how or why and how it's used or anything. Not that it matters.

The fact that this entire plot is just our dense main character bumbling around and leaping to conclusions means that we also have the very terrible experience of the overuse of the narrative question. The writing is rife with them and the whole plot is pushed along by our MC just asking herself a bunch of questions and it felt like so much padding. There is also a very linear story-telling style that adds to an overall air of the author either leading us by the hand through the most obvious things or bashing us over the head with her storytelling style.

The fact "an intoxicating romance" is used to describe this book is a joke. The bad set-up and weak plot makes Emilia a very passive character. It was hard to feel like she had an agency. Wrath was a brooding bad boy trope, but like diluted to it's most bland and undistinguishable. The progression of said romance was a bunch of nothing.

I have no good things to say about this, truly.