Take a photo of a barcode or cover
crispycritter's Reviews (516)
This book couldn't decide what it wanted to be, a cozy time travel romance? A spy thriller? A self-insert fanfic? Upmarket fiction? And so it ended up being bad. Very bad. I'm starting to get a sense for what a book is going to be like based on which Book Club is recommending it. I think it's safe to say Good Morning America picks are almost always awful (with the exception of Ink Blood Sister Scribe, which slaps).
The publishers must have thrown a massive advance and tons of marketing moolah into this book instead of investing in the editing it needed, both structurally and at the sentence level. Structural: what even is genre? Screw reader expectations, amirite? Also time travel: how does it work? Fugget about it. Sentence: Pg 42 “He was adjusting with gold-star alacrity in recognizing that it wouldn’t be a reputation-denoting act for a respectable woman to be seen in a public house in the company of bachelors.” Metaphor metahpor metaphor. Stop it.
The publishers must have thrown a massive advance and tons of marketing moolah into this book instead of investing in the editing it needed, both structurally and at the sentence level. Structural: what even is genre? Screw reader expectations, amirite? Also time travel: how does it work? Fugget about it. Sentence: Pg 42 “He was adjusting with gold-star alacrity in recognizing that it wouldn’t be a reputation-denoting act for a respectable woman to be seen in a public house in the company of bachelors.” Metaphor metahpor metaphor. Stop it.
What even are clear character motivations, character consistency between books, and world building.
300 pages in and it’s boring as hell. Mira and Arges are suddenly unlikeable. Anya loves her people (so we’re told) but lowkey wants to blow up an entire city of innocents cause there are a couple baddies? Emma Hamm writes a HoH character. Gives her a magic robot to solve all potential communication issues. Representation? Bad people are super bad and running undine experiments. Why tho?!?! This beta fish man has two dicks and the one spicy scene I read was also painfully vanilla and boring.
I don’t understand why anyone acts the way they do or why things happen. The cover was pretty, though.
300 pages in and it’s boring as hell. Mira and Arges are suddenly unlikeable. Anya loves her people (so we’re told) but lowkey wants to blow up an entire city of innocents cause there are a couple baddies? Emma Hamm writes a HoH character. Gives her a magic robot to solve all potential communication issues. Representation? Bad people are super bad and running undine experiments. Why tho?!?! This beta fish man has two dicks and the one spicy scene I read was also painfully vanilla and boring.
I don’t understand why anyone acts the way they do or why things happen. The cover was pretty, though.
It’s like it will kill CM Nacosta to simply write a scene linearly instead of in the weird-ass disjointed inception style fever dream way she does relentlessly and inartistically. And as a reader, I just didn’t find the exposition about hummingbird migratory patterns and event management nearly as compelling as I did the detailed Minotaur handjobs from Morning Glory Milking Farm. I’m 0/2 for mothman romances. *sigh*
Filing this under indie romances with incredibly generic covers that seem like they’d be meh but actually fricken slap. This was so good. Also a boss/employee dynamic where boss man wasn’t a tool and the power imbalance didn’t make me side eye the legitimacy of the romance? Heck yes. Also baseball. Always baseball.
Not terrible. Not great. Just an incredibly mid monster romance. I kinda felt like the world was half-developed, despite this book feeling like it didn't need to be as long as it did. Everyone's nice here, except for the one bad guy, and there's barely any angst.
There was one moment- the frostbite incident - that was genuinely hilarious.
There was one moment
Not Jack Carr, in the preface, regurgitating Fox News talking points about the erosion of our rights and activist judges. Woof. After reading this and the first couple pages, I got nervous so I looked at some other critical reviews. Seems like this would be a good book for self-indulgent republican readers with little tolerance for nuance. Could I be wrong? Sure. But life is short and I don't owe Jack Carr my time and attention. BACK INTO MONSTER ROMANCE LAND I GO!
