All three stars are for the middle 25% of this book and the brief lead-up to their wedding. Everything else really did not work for me. First, this could function as a prequel to the series, but it spends 75% of the book on a few weeks and then covers more than a year and a half in 25%, skipping large swaths of time in sentences, recapping the plots of the previous two books as subplots of this one, and then spending an inordinate amount of time both on a school plot and an orphan plot that aren't actually related to each other until we remember we ALSO have a villainous cousin plot and he has his hands in everything. The couple lean so heavily on witty banter that we lack real substance in their actual dialogue and only ever have a sense of their feelings in inner monologue, which meant these two spend more than a year and a half married before actually broaching their feelings for one another in a declarative way, and by that point, I was no longer invested. This felt meandering and was ultimately a miss for me, though I did enjoy Kate Reading's narration and some genuinely sweet moments in the run-up to elopement.