mayastef's reviews
175 reviews

I had a fantastic time reading this book. I love it when books use preexisting real-world beliefs to aid in their world-building.  It is quite heaven and hell based, but the reader still gets to explore other afterlife realms like Valhalla, and I LOVE that. I call it a mythology patchwork quilt when books pull inspirations from many mythologies/religions/fairy tales and this book is very that. 
The characters are so unique, quite a skrungly and unexpected handful of co-conspirators. Love some casual queer rep. The descriptions of everything from characters to settings in this book are unique and match the whole heaven/hell thing's tone well. There is an ethereal and otherworldly quality to the descriptions of lots of the characters, which fits so perfectly with the fact that they are all otherworldly creatures to a degree. 
Love me some casual queer representation. 

This book is definitely one that pokes at your soft spots, so if you are feeling like your soft spots are particularly exposed regarding family relations(particularly those with your mother), body image, queerness, and the journey of figuring yourself both in a sexuality and gender way, you might want to shelve this book for another day. 
I think the major unique strength of this book was sometimes its weakness for me. I loved the concept of the author recounting their life via the stories of sea creatures. I think there could've been better balance and transition from sea creature stories to personal stories. I listened to this as an audiobook, so the subject changes sometimes felt jumpy and disjointed to me, but that could be an artifact of me listening to the book instead of reading it.  

A near-perfect, delectable book; I think the little bitty bit that's not fully realized for me that gives me trouble is Anna's character. I think I overall prefer slightly stronger characters. These characters are not weak or unlovable, so do not get me wrong. In the pursuit of a fantastic plot, I think a little bit of character quirks are lost because there's no time to get into all the little things that really make characters/people truly unique. 
Fake marriage? inheritance schemes? private islands? great chemistry? What else could a girl ask for plot-wise? 
I highly recommend this book. I started and finished it in the span of about 12 hours (8 of which I was asleep).  

I tried so hard to push through to keep reading this book. I just never got the motivation to pick it up again. The writing is fine and the story is fine. Its all just fine, nothing to write home about. It's not even so bad that is ends up being funny to read :( truly just fine all around

My library only had the audiobook version of this, and the two voice actors were criminal. Pick an accent and stick to it please <3 and if you're gonna do an accent, do it well <3.
This book was fine; I'm too much of a stickler for workplace misconduct to truly enjoy plotlines that involve workplace romance with such significant power imbalances. 
I do have positive thoughts about this book, but I can't think of them, to be honest. It was overall good, not great, not horrible. Just good. Which is perfectly fine!  

I am shook that Elena gets back together with Jax after he basically ruins her life and career without a second thought. Just to push her away because 'wah wah I have problems and I don't want to bring her down for the rest of our lives'. My brother in christ you just dragged her to hell. I do understand that he goes and puts bandaids over his mistakes. If a man insulted me like that and damaged my career in that manner he better pray to every god he can think of that I will graciously spare his life.

As far as romance as a whole genre goes, this book is great, but as far as Emily Henry's collection of works goes, this book is mid. The characters have personality traits that I personally find annoying or cannot relate to, so I am not as invested in their stories. I don't know how to explain it, but I can't suspend my rational thinking and believe these two will be together forever and ride off into the sunset. 
All of the characters are written beautifully and have unique and distinct personalities, even if they only play small roles in the story. 
I think I want romance books to commit harder to the whole fake dating thing, and that's my personal preference.  

I would recommend this book, but I don't see myself reading it again. It falls into the same category in my brain as an Emily Henry or Ashley Poston book where the characters are dealing with a lot of outside forces and often the side characters are just as important to driving the plot as the main couple. Personally, I love that vibe, but if you're looking for just a straight-to-the-point, easy, breezy, beautiful romance book, that's not what this is. 
The characters deal with a lot of real shit in this book, so definitely make sure you are in the right headspace; the book does start with a trigger warnings list. 
Edit: I keep completely forgetting how fun the premise of this book is! Not that other things  in the story aren't important enough to fill the space, but I wish we had a little more exploration of the almost fake dating premise. 

I had a great time reading this book. For reference, I am a fairly new F1 fan, but I have lots of background knowledge. I'll start with the small things I disliked about this book because, overall, I have mostly nice things to say. My main complaint is that sometimes in the storytelling, the timelines would jump around a bit. These jumps made sense narratively, but sometimes it made it hard to remember exactly what year/season was being spoken about. My secondary personal problem complaint is that I got the ick a little bit for F1 during the vegas chapter. It was all information I already knew but putting it all together in conjunction with the narrative voice of the book made me think about it too hard <3. Still like the sport and the book I just had a small moment. 
As far as positives I think everything else about this book is so well done. There is a great mix of topics from engineering, to business, to personal stories, to team stories, and loads of new information. I think the balance between commonly known information and more niche info is balanced very well. In the Senna and Schumacher sections its almost impossible for fans of the sport to be completely ignorant of these eras but a great job is done in explaining who these men are and what made them special without feeling redundant to someone who knows the lore. 
Great book for all levels of F1 knowledge.

I recognize I am probably not the intended reader for this book, but I read it, and I will share my thoughts. As an F1 fan, I really appreciate and respect the attention to detail in terms of descriptions of races and just general things related to the sport.
Take my thoughts with a grain of salt because I don't consider myself a dark romance reader, BUT I do separately read romance and thrillers, so I'm not completely out of my depth.

Romance: I like the bones of this concept, F1 driver and Reporter? cute. Lil age gap with the man being the young one? cute. Grumpy sunshine vibes? sure. In practice, I think that the romance plotline is poorly executed. I understand as a romance reader, we suspend our beliefs for a bit, but the speed at which they go from hating to would literally die for each other does not make any sense to me. There was no real event that changed this outlook. It feels like the switch flipped off the screen. I love that they are ride or die and are perfect in every way for each other, but I think a compelling romance storyline needs tension/friction to feel like a worthwhile reading experience.

Dark/Thriller: The long-term revenge killing/serial killer plot point is cool conceptually. I think it ends up feeling quite rushed. Sasha has been plotting this for about a decade, but the actual murders happen quite quickly and, in my opinion, quite sloppily. This plot being jammed into a book that also has a romance plotline and a sports plotline (João WDC) does a disservice to all the separate plots. The suspense just doesn't build for me, I think a lot of what makes a thriller plot compelling is the suspense and anxiety.
 
Spice: Sure. Fine. Whatever. It's there; I will say that some personal icks are involved in the spice experience for me (the uses of the words 'slit' and 'velvety dick,' to be specific). Maybe I was reading too fast to try to get the whole experience over with but the logistics also make no sense of what positions they end up in.
 
Misc: Someone needed to proofread this book. I caught multiple spelling and grammatical issues, and some details were also incorrect, and it irked me so bad. "angle of death" is a crazy typo. We gotta catch that one, folks.

TLDR: It is not for me, I would not recommend it, but I am not upset that I spent time reading this book.  I've got too many major issues with plots/characters/actual sentence structure to give this book a good review.

I was absolutely devouring 90% of this book. It lost steam for me personally in the last 10%. My personal tastes of how love is shown to me do not align with things happening at the end so it made it painful for me personally. Normal people will eat that ending bit up, I get it it is lovely but its my personal hell.

grand public gestures are not it for me so the whole grand gesturing to a live studio audience and an audience of millions made me want to DIE so that hindered my enjoyment of the book