1.5 ⭐️

this book was a MESS

I thought I already didn't like the first book but this one truly took the cake which is such a shame because the concept for spiral was perfect imo. I was so excited when I read that this was about a professional hockey player x ballerina. everything had so much potential! 
then came the execution..

》the pacing was terrible. 
not to mention the last 20% where I genuinely thought I had picked the wrong audiobook and it ran overtime or had an excerpt for the next book in it bc there was still so much time left but no..
imagine you have this love story that entirely resolves itself by 80%, and then because 272 pages isn't enough, you have to squeeze another 68 pages of unnecessary so called plot and drama behind it that felt entirely rushed and for what? a page count that starts with a 3?

》have I mentioned the editing? 
considering the fact that this is a huge error in literally the first sentence of the chapter, the third word even, you'd think someone, an editor perhaps, anyone, or maybe a beta reader, might've caught this but oh no. 
— let me quote: "the four-year wait is worth every second." 
my first thought, wait what? years long time jump?? how'd that happen??
but from the context that isn't given in the following smut chapter, one might gather that it's meant to say "four-month wait"
I thought perhaps that this had been righted in the ebook which I checked just in case I might've misheard the narrator. but it's written there, just like he read it..
— now at this point I genuinely thought this was the mislabelled epilogue or something because yk 4 year time skip and everything had been resolved but I was gravely mistaken because I'd been robbed of another 2 hours of my life. 

》considering this was supposed to be a fake dating romance we don't really see much of it. it starts out as her throwing herself at him, him rejecting her, her misunderstanding his reasoning and then he comes bulldozing back into her life with the audacity of a rich white dude and then they date and they say its fake but they don't even fucking pretend to act like its fake. the so called stakes are lost after like 20% 

》as for the characters, I'm still searching high and low for that chemistry.
romance books thrive on chemistry and tension, and this had neither, which had a massive impact on how I perceived what should've been important scenes. 
those scenes lost their impact because the foundation of their relationship didn't feel right. they built such nice tropes onto a virtually non existent base.

》listen, I did liked sage as a character, most of the time anyway. unless elias showed up. until 80% sage's entire self-respect went hurdling out the damn window every time he was around, and it was so hard to read. 
elias on the other hand was insufferable.
what's worse is he didn't once have to crawl back on his knees begging. elias got handed everything he said he didn't want on a silver platter, rejected it, and then got it all back anyway?? absolute shit show.
the relationship I enjoyed most, however, was easily Sage and Sean's sibling bond. It was so wholesome and lovely.

》I don't know if this is just me but their issues didn't get talked about deeply enough imo. they dance around it and they get mentioned to explain behaviour but that's it :/

》the writing style also stood out to me in a more negative way this time around. the one thing I sadly can't forget is sage comparing herself to a cat in heat when she's grinding on him. 

》lastly, I also wasn't the biggest fan of the narrators. I liked them in general but not in the sage x elias scenes, which was unfortunate since those were the most frequent ones. 

》summer and aiden did grow on me as characters, and in comparison, I might actually have to raise my rating on collide bc it was definitely better than this.


now I'm unsure if I even want to pick up the third book in this series ://