I really wanted to love this, but the writing was distractingly… bad, or maybe just in a style I couldn’t stand. I had to skim a lot of it to get through the book. There were three main annoyances for me: a lot of incomplete sentences/sentence fragments; constant use of ellipses in the dialogue; and using “that” and “those” as determiners so often it became weird and noticeable early and didn’t improve.

The characters were strong, and I was invested enough in Archibald and Darren to stick with them and see how it ended. The angst was angsting, a little harder than I personally needed it to, but it made their reunion very sweet. There was a lot of non-graphic animal abuse that made sense for the time period, story, and characters, but it was almost too much for me.