This is my second Ann Aguirre book, and I had a lot of issues with it that I don't remember having with my first by her (notably not the first book in this series, which wasn't my best move). Overall, the book is kind of bogged down in unnecessary details and instances of virtue signaling, which get old pretty fast - pieces that I'm sure Aguirre meant as an effort towards diversity and inclusion that just aren't worked in well and feel heavy-handed.  

But I'm also really irritated that this book is marketed as having bisexual representation when the only reference made to Clem's bisexuality is that she thinks about a time when she almost asked out another woman in her coven. I absolutely don't have an issue with bisexual people ending up in straight (or straight-passing, perhaps, since Gavin says somewhere that he's always been kind of a vibes person when it comes to attraction) relationships. It was just really disappointing to have this introduced by the blurb as something that seemed like it would be explicit, and the word "bisexual" doesn't even appear in the book. 

I'll probably read the other books in the series, but I'm glad that I read this one before I recommended any of them to anyone on the premise of them being good and clear queer rep. 

Thank you Sourcebooks and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

the hero has taken away witches' powers in the past and atones for this, manipulative parents and grandparents, parental abandonment, divorced parents behaving badly.