The general world-building on this was okay. Interest concepts but very minimal fleshing out of a lot of it, so you end up with sort of an ominous "government/kingdom" as the villain, with another church-esque society that is not really explained despite most of the main characters being a part of or related to it, and then a soul-mate mechanism which is very rare and therefore confusing to both characters and readers. Dialogue is stilted at times; awkward. It reads like a YA novel except the content is too spicy to be YA.

Still, the two main characters are fine. The MMC is interesting and you want to know more about his backstory; the FMC is more of a series of tropes held together with tape but not too annoying. It's easy to root for them to end up together in the end. This is a book #1 but I don't think I will be reading any of the other books in the series, even though I am sure they go into more of the world building detail that was lacking here.