thank you to the author for sending me this copy in exchange for an honest review! all thoughts are my own.

when i started a "touch of death," i honestly wasn't sure what i was expecting, which i think was the best way to go into this. i loved going through the story slowly to understand the characters and their motivations, because that's what drives it forward.

catherine's point of view provides such a great reading experience—i felt her pain, panic, exhaustion and confusion in real time. she was a great window into the story. her relationship with nate was hard to follow at times, but i liked their rocky trust in each other because it was genuinely unstable and wasn't one of those conflicts that could have just been solved with a conversation (looking at you, rom coms). they were so fun to watch bicker and take care of each other and then scream about their traumas.

nate himself was a character i never really knew how to feel about, and i actually really enjoyed that. one minute, he's being tortured, then he's saving catherine, then he's being an ass again, then he's being soft ... it was really enjoyable to go through the novel and try to figure him out. all in all, the cast of characters in this book was really enjoyable to spend my time with, which is always my biggest thing when reading.

the plot, on the other hand, was a lot more work to figure out. i definitely had a ton of questions throughout the story, and the ending didn't answer many of them (i am tempted to get the next book, though). it was a bit confusing at times, but i got used to it and learned to lean into the unknown, which really helped make the reading experience more fun.

final thoughts: i really enjoyed this book! i think the story is definitely going to take more installments for me to fully understand (good thing it's a series, huh?) but this was a pretty strong and intriguing start.

read on my blog here: https://earthtojulia.com/2020/12/21/review-a-touch-of-death/