Battling between 2 and 3 stars for this so we’ll go with 2 1/2.

Aeden (hero)’s sister uses her magic to bring Abigail from the future to their time. Aeden is looking for a wife and his sister is sure Abby is the perfect match.

I’m feeling conflicted about this book. The beginning I found pretty boring and actually was shocked I was only 50% done as I was sure I’d been reading hundreds of pages (I hadn’t 😒) but the second half really picked up.

The characters overall were like-able, if a bit flat. I didn’t love the heroine but a big part of that was probably her 21st century sarcasm and also saying things in her head like “Holy shit! He’s hot!” Which really didn’t do anything for me. Use descriptions to tell me why he’s hot!

I found quite a few things that annoyed me about the book. The heroine spends plenty of time complaining about everything even though she’s so interested in history and wants to be a museum curator. When she time travels there is zero interest in how things ran, the artifacts, the architecture. She is solely focused on how pig poop smells, how often people bathe, the color of peoples teeth, the amount of salt in the food and I just found it surprising that there was zero interest generated by her for the time period shift.

She also talks about her dead boyfriend a decent amount. I tend to shy from second chance romance tropes, I just want to focus on this couple, so this probably won’t bother most people.

The heroine seemed to easily be able to walk away from interactions with the hero like she was unaffected, then becomes possessive and mad with jealousy in the next second. In fact I felt like there was a lot of back and forth in the book without consistent feeling. He loves her. No she must go back. Ok she’ll stay. No they can’t be together. Ok they talk about getting married. Now he wants her to go back to be safe. Maybe if I got to walk through these decisions with the characters I would have understood it more but it just seemed like a new paragraph would start and someone would start saying the exact opposite they said previously.

There is a side plot of another clan coming and a member thinking Abby is his lost betrothed. Supposedly Abby sticks out like a sore thumb with her accept and non rotten teeth but cannot dissuade another clan member that she isn’t his betrothed? It was also many pages and conversations of “You are my betrothed! “No I’m not!” Repeat 20 times...

And my last big complaint, is the way the revenge plot was done in this book. It is basically “implied” that Aeden’s other sister was married to a rival clan and badly abused. She comes back partially blind and most likely raped. This sister is not in the book at all (I’m assuming she will have her own story down the road) but I didn’t like that it was a few sentences thrown in the middle of his wife hunt so the reader would know that he would be seeking revenge. It felt like a slap to his poor sister to barely be mentioned when she possibly experienced a year of complete horror and hell. It felt wrong that his other sister could use magic and they were all worried about weddings and not comforting/addressing the abused family member. (To all my bloodthirsty revengers....I would have used my magic to smote the rapists) The whole thing just felt out of place to me. Towards the end of the book the revenge plot picked up with hardly any mention of the abused sister.

I may continue with the series if I can find the second book at a good price. I’m mildly curious about what happens next.