Love this deep friendship at the center of this series

If you've liked the previous Warped books, you need to read this one.

What this book excelled at was upping the stakes for the series. I've loved the case-of-the-week structure of the previous books, but this one departs from that as our cast starts to dance with the Big Bad of the series. It's done well, giving us real consequences and new problems to tackle.

And *squeals* the romance balances both being slow-burn and giving us a little tidbit so well.

Thanks to Dark Owl Fantasy for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

This novella is something special. It carefully guides you into a world of deadly crystals and dangerous deserts. I loved every minute of this, and highly recommend it.

It's slow and melancholy. Just enough going on not to be boring.

The way this author uses exclusively default-male pronouns is gross. Oh, you're a writer? Must be a man.

This book spends pages lecturing about the importance of metaphor and underlying ideas. How the real power of stories comes from the lessons inside of them. Then, this book pivots to telling you to pick a compelling protagonist, one that uses he/him pronouns, of course. Yikes.

The absolute GALL of this author to pretend to care about the underlying message, then have the underlying message of his book be blatant sexism?!?! I am utterly enraged. Why is this book so popular? Because I do not trust a word this author writes after the putrid mess that is not bothering to consider the existence of women and non-binary people.

This humor style (awkward social moments, horny, slapstick) doesn't work for me

Very fun! I'm excited to continue the series