It's kind of hard for me to judge this book on its own, because it so distinctly feels like one half of the story for me. I got that feeling even before I reached the ending, which definitely does NOT fulfill the typical romance genre promises.  This isn't uncommon for duologies, I suppose, but it does leave me feeling like I've only read half of the book and shouldn't yet judge.

But this story IS published as a complete book, so I suppose here goes. In many regards, it's super fun, in that way total emotional roller coasters tend to be! I love how trope-y it is: there's arranged marriage, enemies to lovers, only one bed, it's got it all. I love how it mixes a distinct bodice ripper vibe with slow, slow burn. The setting is in many ways creative and engaging, although I was a bit thrown by the intermixing of made-up trees, birds, and animals with regular ones like boars. I enjoyed following the culture clashes between the two leads, and I appreciated how utterly queernorm the setting is, regardless of the culture: same-sex marriages are commonplace, there's a nonbinary character everyone easily accepts for who they are, and it is even acknowledged that ace people exist.

Perhaps my favorite thing is the secret behind the marriage and parts of how it was handled. We get some information about the hidden plot early on, which injects extra tension into the tale, but the details, the specifics, and the reasons behind it all only get revealed later. Funnily enough, this is also the most frustrating thing. That initial injection of information was great. The last few chapters where everything came into the open, with the tension and the action and the fallout, were the best. I couldn't put the book down for a second when I reached that part! In the middle, though, there were a lot of missed opportunities to feed the reader some disjointed crumbs of information. I mean, there were SOME crumbs! But not nearly enough, and perhaps that's why a lot of the time, the pacing seemed to bog down. Or maybe it was just because some scenes ran entirely too long while adding nothing new. Or maybe a combination of these factors. In any case, I felt there were a lot of opportunities to pad the feels and drama with extra sociopolitical excitement, making the relationship development more meaningful,

I did very much enjoy the eventual conflict (un)resolution and all that promising drama in the end, and I'm definitely going to be reading the second half book. The best thing for me about the place where the book left off is that Cador is explicitly sorry for doing THAT to Jem, while Jem is mad that Cador would do THAT at all. That's the type of conflict that I love—the one that's not so much about the specific action the romance leads took when they didn't even know each other, but about their entire ethical values systems, who they are as people, and if/how they're going to find a way to meet in the middle.