High seas adventure with mythical characters and powers that are kept secret—even from the ones who will come to wield their magic. What’s not to like? 

Bit repetitive in parts but such a fun wild story, including pirates and the uncovering of long-held secrets, family reunions and surprise villains. An adventurous easy-to-read follow up to the first in the series. 

It’s a fun time-travel story that is leading to a predictable romantic climax, though the pace of that seems just right. The setting of Edinburgh is so much fun—especially that it’s not fully immersive and removed from our own reality, but allows for all the remarks we’d certainly have about the streets, hygiene and clothing of the time (I love the off-handed modern 21st CE comments in the Victorian setting).

My only complaint is that the audiobook narrator is inconsistent with the accents.

As period drama detective novels go, these are unique, clean fun.

 

The unique portion of the story is the 1000 year difference, though we don’t get enough of either story to draw upon our deeper sympathies. The romance is flimsy and fundamentally physical, though there seems to be a history there, somewhere. Maybe. The characters lacked… lacked… well, the majority of the characters were found starkly lacking when the personality department came round asking for evidence of interesting qualities. Mostly, they are an uninteresting group of sex-crazed, uninformed, attention-seeking persons of a certain age regardless of their generational timeline who display briefly woke sentiments from time to time between their prevailing narcissism. Quite like an mind-numbing hour or so on … (pick your social media poison) but with a sort of hidden plot somewhere there in the background between all the banging bodies and other blood-letting action scenes. 

 

It wasn’t as bad as some others in the genre. 

 

As I should have expected (but of course, I did), things end with strands of frayed clothing snagged on the proverbial high cliff, and if I can remember reading this by the time the sequel is released, I will likely see where it all goes, library style. 

There is a brilliant fantasy story full of high altitude action and snarky dragons with a riveting plot tucked between the abundant vocabulary-sparse pages of this tiresome juvenile romance written as nasty cheap trash. ‘Erotica’ is too classy a term. This novel is only so agonisingly long because the plot (which alone would make a normal sized novel and would be excellent) is sadly secondary to the author’s obsession to pen repeat trashy sex scenes and rehash a lingering disagreement between the lovers that drags on and on and on and yawn…

This is the sad state of ‘modern literature’ folks. Here is my breakdown:

1. Plot—an absolutely astounding 5 stars, hands down fantastic for about 200pp scattered throughout, with politics, magic, dragons, deception, traitors, a rebellion—but overall, it is all so desperately tedious. By 80% I was exhausted from circling back to the same old same old yet again. When someone said, ‘…[so many hours] and we’ll all be dead’ it was like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and I was filled with hope. Yes. Please. Die soon all of you.

2. Writing Style—💩repetitive, lean (but wordy), crass dialogue often lost in the inability to identify the speaker (this was sometimes the writing, sometimes a narration issue*)… a few times flashed sarky humour and wit, which kept me going, as well as the promising plot.

3. Character Development—🤧a sneezed booger left on the page with lots assumed and not much developed—easy to lose track of many of the secondary and tertiary peeps due to lack of development, but no worry, they mostly die—though some develop a personality along the way. 

4. Language (as in: use of sophisticated vocabulary, beautiful and aesthetic quality)—⚠️limited, juvenile, crass, vulgar, frequently foul, never poetic; story is king here, language is a mere tool.

5. Relationships—☠️toxic, narcissistic, full of bloated confessions and stormy immature ungrounded emotions everyone flings like silly string and daggers at one another without forethought or consideration, and the main two characters continuously revisit the same tired unresolved argument; characters hold on to irrational grudges and foster jealousy, and tensions fuel between people who barely know each other.

6. *Rebecca Soler’s narration is nasal, frantic, every man has the same raspy voice, every woman a whiny bite, and the whiff of accents come and go, making it difficult to identify the speaker (either she can’t do accents or forgets who has what accent because of the Garbage Island quantity of characters).

And then I got to the end and— This isn’t the end!? Ugh. It’s the end for me. Enough is enough.

 

An eerie premonition prevailed in the initial pages and first half of this story, despite the bleak modern backdrop of southern American poverty. The building romantic tension, though crafted on a twisted sense of belonging, felt fragile and haunting, and then fell flat just after it became less interesting. 

 

A slow moving book that deserved a faster pace as a heart-pounding mystery, and far fewer pages. 

 

The cover stirs the right kind of Southern Gothic feel you want the book to give...but... ah well… 

Frosty the Snowman a la Nicholas Sparks.

Dripping with melancholy and ephemeral false hope. This might be the imaginings of lonely people or the fairytale truth of an isolated community.