Sadly, this was a disappointment. Going by the absolutely gorgeous cover and a couple reviews I've seen, I was expecting a cozy fantasy in the vein of Legends & Lattes. And I suppose that's exactly what it was intended to me, but... I don't know. The cozy parts fell kind of flat, there were too many non-cozy ones, and most importantly, I had a lot of problems with the writing. Normally, I'm pretty lenient when it comes to the quality of editing in indie books, but that's when the problems come down to a few awkward turns of phrases and typos per novel. This book, however, needs a ton more editing. There are lots of very obvious mistakes, there's at least one character randomly changing names in the middle of the story, and I get the feeling the author was trying for an omniscient POV, but in most cases, just ended up head-hopping a whole lot. Which made it really hard for me somehow to connect to any of the characters.

Speaking of characters, most of them gave me a lot of the same "I get what you were trying to do, and I would have enjoyed it if it was done properly, but alas." Normally, I tend to really like prickly characters who alienate people because of their troubled pasts and then gradually learn to relax around people and let them in again, when subjected to enough kindness. Finlay is, one hand, exactly that. On the other hand, the way he acts from the start is so off-putting that I just didn't want to get to know him very much. I was a little more invested in Annika because she had some nice moments from the start, but I never connected very much to her either. The rest of the characters felt like unfilled sketches: underdeveloped ideas that I would have loved hanging out with if they gained more flesh.

I will say, that in spite of it all, whenever I began considering DNFing, something happened that grabbed my attention to last me another couple of chapters. There are a lot of interesting worldbuilding details here, both on the actual world level and on the "day-to-day of the royal palace" level. I was particularly interested in the magic system and Fin's gifts. Though when it came to the food he was preparing, my immersion was sometimes broken by how some of the specific new meals he made in this high fantasy setting retained their regular real-world names, like kimchi, etc. It made me question why they'd be called that and took me right out of the world. There were also a lot of nice moments with the kitchen staff, and the prince coming in to play with the kitten, etc that were objectively rather cozy and feel-good, it was just that the way these characters were written (see above) made it so hard to connect to them. And what is coziness without experiencing it through likable characters, really?