I won a copy from a Storygraph giveaway. This is actually the second book that I’ve won from this author!

While my cons are longer than my pros (making notes as I went), I did enjoy this one. Genuinely. I don’t think I’ll seek out the second one, but I would read it if it presented itself.

Pros:

Dialogue has improved from previous titles. Still stilted in places, but it’s definitely better.

You can *feel* how personal this is, especially from the “unable to fully transition” aspect. The pain Lucas feels (especially in the beginning) comes across raw in a truly emotional way.

“Secret Monster Society right next to Humans” is always a fun space to play around in. It’s fun to see how different species (and their cultures) mesh with the human world and with each other. Would’ve loved more on the merfolk 🙏

Cons:

Occasional grammatical mistakes. Nothing egregious aside from two conversations near the end, where the punctuation implies different speakers but either doesn’t make sense in context or there are three people who could’ve said it.

The pacing and Lucas’ priorities are all over the place in the second half of the book.

Going from Lucas processing vampirism to “I need to solve my parents murder and I think it was vampires” (which is left completely dangling and could’ve been cut for pacing since the scene with the nymphs adds nothing.) to Veronica’s crash-out takes less than 30 pages, which is like 33% of my copy.

. Also, Lucas undergoes a LOT of internal processing in that time (which is 3 in-universe days??) that we simply Do Not See And Have To Accept He’s Actually Totally Fine Now, Really.

While I do appreciate that it’s fade-to-black, any romance between Jeffery and Lucas is either subtext that I completely missed or comes from moments of insta-horny :/

I still don’t get why the vampires didn’t hire a PI to find Lucas after they lost track of him post-divorce&social transition if it’s THAT big of a deal to keep track of kin. I know they said they meant to find him again, but why not pay someone to do it if you’re not gonna do it sooner?