I don’t know what is going on but there have been so many angsty forbidden romances lately! Haha! I went into this completely blind and didn’t know what to expect. I was actually surprised to realize this had a romance in it, which I wasn’t expecting, for some odd reason.

This takes place a few years after Brave, the movie. Merida is kind of stuck and stagnant. The whole castle is and that’s the issue that needs to be resolved. She doesn’t know what she wants from life but keeps traveling around. Like most gods, here they come to cause some chaos.

This book is hard for me to review. I wanted to love it but I found myself really trying to push through and not DNF. The plot is so slow and takes forever to go anywhere. We take half the book to hit the first of 3 places. Then the next two places are so fast especially, the last. They spend a couple of pages there when it was chapters for the previous. I wanted to spend the most time there because it was the most fascinating!

My favorite part about this book was the romance. I am not going to say more because I don’t want to give too many things away. It’s just such a slow build and then becomes quite angsty. I think this was the most mature part of this book. The writing felt very, very young. Considering this was supposed to take place in her teens if felt younger. I was really disappointed with Merida’s overall character arch too. I’m also not going to delve into that either for spoiler reasons. I will say, there are some contradictory things to the movie. In the movie, she and her mom finally understood each other. This kind of blurs that and I feel it isn’t true to the original story.

Overall, I did like this but I didn’t love it. Even though the plot was slow it was a decently fast read. I’m glad I stuck with it because I did enjoy the romance but there are a lot of things lacking here. This definitely reads for a much younger audience, so keep that in mind. The last third of the book is very rushed and feels a bit unfinished.

Thank you to Dinsey Press and Netgalley for a copy of this book to review.