Thank you to PeachTree Teen and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review! All thoughts are my own. 

Despite this being a lengthy novel(over 400 pages total), this was fun, and easier to get through than I expected. The three POVs of Aleksey, Kazik and Gisela were appropriately distributed throughout the story, with their own memorable personalities and secrets embedded throughout their budding romance that sometimes made me nervous to turn the page. My favorite of those three main characters was definitely Gisela, with her endless snark and her thirst for life(and sometimes vengeance). I also appreciated that while this is marketed as a polyamorous romance, and this is definitely going to be a throuple(everyone involved is attracted to each other), it wasn’t a clear-cut route for most of the story. There was some back-and-forth and even moments of jealousy, the latter thing I never see addressed in any polyamorous romance.

Although parts of the romance can be labeled as straight-presenting, the main characters are all distinctly queer—bisexual, to be exact—and occasionally, there are moments to deconstruct some of the biphobia they face for being attracted to the opposite gender. Usually, queer romances are labeled as queer because they happen between two people of the same gender, and while I don’t know if there’s been any biphobic discourse to trickle over into queer books that don’t fit that formula, even outside of the book world, this was topical.

While I thought the integration of Polish folklore was seamless, and appreciated the life breathed into the story by the creatures(ironically, some of them are undead), I felt that because of the vagueness of the setting, that was the only foundation it could have to sit on. Instead of the lack of a specified time period giving this story a timeless feel, it feels flimsy when it’s juxtaposed by occasional millennial slang. Sometimes, this can even make the tone feel unclear, as it draws more attention to the hijinks than some of the mystery, and it also took me out of the story. (The only indicator we have for a time period is that cars and cameras exist, and there is a single mention of “a war”, so I have to assume it takes place after one of the World Wars?)

Still, though, I loved the magic(especially the Water Nymphs and Wojcjech), the pacing of the romance, and the bits of fairytale influence. I’m interested to see how this story is continued, and how the love triangle will be affected by a couple of supernatural ethics… (Not elaborating, to avoid major spoilers!)