I received a special edition of this book with Bookish Box that has been sitting on the shelf for a while, so I finally read it. 

Ultimately, I just really struggled with this one. It took me forever to read, the romance was pretty unbelievable because of how little the characters actually interacted and how short of a time period it was. Pretty sure this book takes place over the course of a couple days. At least that is how it read to me. Scenes were so quick and not very well developed, so I ended up just not caring. Like, why should I care about the long-time family friend who is pledged to help our MC when they only interact one-on-one a single time? I hardly know their background at all. 

When the actual climax of the story happens, it’s over so quick. Like, they go into a compound to release captured mythical beings once the initial fight is over, but we never see it. That would have been such a great opportunity to see our MC grapple with the fact that she is really not safe because there are bad people out there that will take advantage of her, especially after living basically a sheltered life not knowing she was one of these beings. But we totally gloss over it and just say “oh yeah, let’s talk about what happened over a dinner that gets more details about what we are eating than the actual extraction of captured creatures.” Like, what was that?! 

When it comes to the setting, I have no idea when this takes place. I felt lost a lot without really any indication of time period here. 

I really liked that there is diversity of the mythical beings here. I had no idea about some of them in general, so I was excited to interact with them more. I just wish we had been given more opportunity here. Even just a single scene would have been nice. 

It felt like every single scene needed to be more developed to show more character growth, relationship building, world building. For what this book was trying to accomplish, it probably needed another 50-100 pages of showing and not telling to engage the reader more fully and make us care about everyone. Give us higher stakes, give us more of that found-family vibe by giving us WAY more time with the group. It just needed a lot more work on the development side. 

There were also just some grammar choices made in editing that are not to my taste that kept grabbing my attention when I was reading. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Overall, I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone and I do not plan to continue the series.