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alechains 's review for:
Double Apex
by Josie Juniper
emotional
lighthearted
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
First, the FMC Phaedra was infuriating. She acts like a freaking teenager who has never had an interaction with another human being so her go to is aggression and deflection. I get she is a woman in a usually "man's world" so she's heard every sexist and misogynistic remark to ever exist but at least give people the benefit of doubt before you chew their heads off. She hates the MMC for being a playboy and his unprofessional flirty comments on the radio while they are working and everyone else can hear definitely doesn't help to get her to like him and I get that part, he was asked to stop many times and he didn't so I would want to smack him too because that kind of behavior undermines her authority in front of everyone so I totally get that part. However, her insults and comments to her supposed best friend when they were arguing were very immature and infuriating. Both of them are annoying, they are basically high schoolers with secrets and when one confronted the other they just insulted each other, fought and acted like the other didn't exist. WTF! These are supposed to be adults but most characters in this book don't act that way.
Now the MMC, besides what I already mentioned about undermining his engineer by making flirty comments and using pet names while at work, he had his very sweet moments. However the first impression of him was not the best at all. He gets better as the book progresses but he could have been even better if we got more context about his childhood and what he went through. We got some of the story but I think they could have gone deeper into it to get some vulnerability, the same for Phaedra, there has to be a reason why her default is being a bitch when she's confronted about something.
What I did like about this were the family relationships: Phaedra's relationship with Mo, her father, although I would have loved to see more of it, the little we got was cute and the email she read made me cry. Then also her relationship with the silver fox Klaus, heat like another father figure and mentor and their conversations were great but I expected her to grovel a bit and apologize to him for being a bitch but they just gloss over it. And lastly Cosmin's relationship with his sister, you can tell they are close and what they went through as children brought them together to help others, we see a bit about that but again, I would have liked to see more.
After all of this I'm still on the fence about whether this is an ok book or not 🙃