I really enjoyed Max, the FMC. She was a whirlwind of unfiltered questions, awkward comments, badassery and endearing naivete. Funny in her bluntness, exceptionally skilled at kicking ass and largely ignorant to the ways of the world. She was a nice collection of dichotomies. I kinda loved her.

I also loved how, despite this being a reverse harem series, the romance aspect really took a back sit and wasn't the priority of the story. It focused surprisingly little on it, which was awesome at first, but lost its shine eventually—I'm here for the romance dammit!

The attention was more centered on Max's exploration and discovery of this new world she knew very little about. On her journey from the hermit life she'd been living with Cyrus, her mentor and father figure, and Rowan, her beloved adopted brother, in a lost cabin in the middle of the woods, into entering the Guild academy, all the attacks by supernatural creatures, building new friendships, etc.

Some potential love interests were introduced in the form of Alpha Team 6, as well as the possibility of another girl also forming part of the harem—which I'd never come across before. A bit of lore regarding artificial, aka magic-fabricated vs thought-to-be-extinct, natural occurring mate bonds was also fleetingly mentioned—we can all guess where <i>that</i> is going LOL. But the potential ability to awaken natural bonds in other protectors—and supernatural creatures—wasn't the only unusual thing about Max, there was something going on with her, something unique and different. Something that had people equally intrigued and wary about her.

The dialogues were awkward and forced sometimes, and the chapters were mainly from Max's POV although this balanced out a bit the deeper we got into the book, once we were more familiar with this fictional world and needed more insight into the thoughts of the other characters.

Towards the end of the last book of this omnibus it also got slightly annoying how long it took the characters to put the pieces together. Purposeful daftness for the sake of plot is never fun.

All in all, it was super fast paced, established interesting world building, raised some compelling mysteries—and drove me crazy with the lack of answers!—left us on cliffhanger after cliffhanger and was stingy as fuck with the delivery of romantic interactions. The last book wasn't as fun as the previous two, but I still flew through the whole thing and had a good time reading it.