Wow. Such a beautiful book. I went in expecting a YA romance with some family drama on the side, but instead the romance here is intertwined with such a thoughtful exploration of trauma and grief and how both can alter family dynamics. I was so engrossed not just in Penny and Tate’s relationship development, but in everything that accompanied it and in all the layers of their backstory. It was so interesting to see this place they were coming from: not friends, even though they’ve known each other all their lives as their mothers have such a strong friendship they’re practically family; not enemies, even though they’re pretty different and often rile each other up; not exactly united by a common goal until the book starts, but always dealing with various aspects of the same situations. There’s this balance of distance and familiarity that really made their connection work for me.

Penny was my favorite character here. I really liked how PTSD was handled and my heart absolutely broke for her because of her relationship with her mother. At the same time, it was very clear that her mother was acting out of grief, not out of spite, and struggling with her own trauma—except she was doing it in that terrible way some people have when they’re too scared to process and make a path through their grief: dragging others, specifically Penny, with her, preventing Penny from healing, forcing her to carry all the emotional load. And I absolutely loved Tate, too, with her quiet strength, her emotional maturity, the way she found it so natural to both be mad at someone for what they did wrong and want to help them with whatever they’re suffering, her ability to stand up to a bad situation and say as loudly as it needs to be said, This is fucked up. 

There are things that aren’t our fault, but how we deal with them in the aftermath is our responsibility, and this book really drives this point home. But it never feels moralizing—it feels real and alive.

I also want to take a moment to appreciate how skillfully multiple timelines are handled here. Tess Sharpe has a real knack for creating narratives like this, weaving together these different story threads to form a narrative that hits all the right nerves at all the right points. And then there’s also the additional thread that involves the girls’ friends banding up to help and gradually developing their own unexpected romance that was a joy to read, providing a bit of emotional relief when things got heavy in the main story but never detracting attention from it. It’s this whole landscape of foreshadowing and reveals, setting up deliberate gaps and then filling them, and when I finished the book I just had to sit there for a moment looking back and admire the level of craft that went into it.

I feel like I’ve got rather little to say about this book—not because I disliked it, but because it just… very reliably did exactly what it said on the tin, you know? This is a solid lighthearted romance that is there to provide the reader with a few hours of comfort and escapism. All the feels are good feels, the characters slide into each other’s lives easily, and even when there are objectively dramatic situations happening, it all feels very chill and low-drama. 

We’ve got Cole, the heir to a vineyard who can only keep being a heir if he gets married soon. His grandparents are all about family values, you see. They would rather give the vineyard to Cole’s sister who *is* getting married, knowing full well she’ll sell it, then let it go to an unmarried grandson who truly cares for it, because it’s a *family* vineyard. Luckily, they don’t mind if he marries another guy. 

We’ve also got Rhett, twin brother to Cole’s best friend, who’s been unlucky in love later. And to get his family off his back about it, he pretends that he’s in some secret relationship. 

Then the two run into each other in a bar, share their grievances, and realize they’re the solutions to each other’s problems. Cole will pose as the no-longer-secret boyfriend! And Rhett will be Cole’s future fake husband! Now off they go to attend Cole’s sister’s wedding on Tahiti, where of course they’ll fall in love for real in a tropical paradise while having to share a bed.

Despite the fact the leads have known each other all their lives, there’s this super insta-love feel to their relationship. But we do get a bunch of reminders that we’re dealing with the “best friend’s brother“ trope, too, in the form of Ryan, the best friend/brother in question who tries hard to be supportive but also struggles to wrap his head around the fact that his twin and his BFF are now an item. This plotline, just like some stuff about Cole’s family, could have injected some drama and seriousness in the story, but the way it’s handled, it really doesn’t. All the struggles feel really low-stakes and fluffy at all times, and you know what? That’s great, actually. Not every book needs to be a memorable deep dive into every issue the characters face. Sometimes, you just need pure mindless life-affirming fluff. 

Such a beautifully crafted story! Reading it was like solving an intricate puzzle. There are all these layers here: the story of the exiled empress who conquered the empire through a long, clever game; her former servant girl, now an old woman, telling that story; and the cleric recording it. For such a short book, there are so many characters and narrative threads—and then there are also the gaps between those threads. The details Rabbit isn’t sharing. The nuance Chih isn’t fully grasping. The things In-yo kept to herself. The gaps are just as important as the threads for the experience, I found.

In a way, I feel like this book is a tribute to storytelling and history. It is very much about facts, what happened and why and to what end, and while multiple characters have their moments to subtly shine, for the most part characters feel like vehicles for the plot/history to unfold. They hurt, they grieve, they love, they yearn, and they still feel like game pieces on the board, or parts of a puzzle slotting together, or maybe like real life people from ages ago on a history book page: you know they were as human as you, but in the succinct account of world-shaping events, they feel more like forces of nature or links in a chain.

I’m not sure how much sense I’m making here trying to put these impressions into words, tbh, but this was truly an interesting experience. I usually gravitate toward character-driven fiction that delves deep into everyone’s heads. Here, I was getting to know the characters through events and causal connections, interspersed with short poignant moments that revealed some feelings and motivations more clearly at moments, only to leave many parts of the bigger picture up to interpretation.

I was also deeply moved by the lyrical writing style that perfectly conjured the impressions of duty, loyalty, and coldly calculated rage. I loved Almost Brilliant, Chih’s bird companion. And I really want to know more about the Singing Hills. I really hope the next novellas in this series are just as good and can’t wait to get to them, though I’ll definitely need some palate cleansers between these books to let all the impressions settle.

This was really fun! I loved seeing the MCs go from clashing to gradually discovering how much they compliment each other, with this super low-key enemies to lovers vibe. Chloe is a wonderfully grumpy character with a biting sense of humor. I loved her relationship with her sisters (looking forward to reading their books already!) and the excellent representation of living with chronic pain. So, so relatable. And Red is such a sweet guy, I instantly loved him. His kindness always shined through even when he hit some lower mental places, and I loved how it was always clear from his chapters that he was an artist even when his art wasn’t mentioned—just that specific way he sees the world. His inner journey to recovering after an abusive relationship was well-handled, and I kind of liked that he was the one with that storyline: in m/f romance it’s far more common to see the female lead in this position, and it was refreshing to see another angle.

The book is absolutely packed with delightful banter. Whether these characters communicate face to face or via e-mails, there are always lines to laugh at. Hell, they pack witty one-liners even into their inner monologues, and it always happens so naturally. I kept laughing and smiling as I read. At the same time, the prevalence of humor never cheapened or downplayed the more serious, heavier topics the book touches on.

It would’ve been an absolute five-star read for me if not for how the third-act break-up played out. I know those are a staple of the romance genre—the characters need to have that moment of doubt before they fully commit to their happy ending and all that. But the way it happened, idk, it came a bit out of the left field. On one hand, Red’s backstory does explain why he reacted the way he did, but by that point I would’ve expected it to be a shorter knee-jerk reaction followed by talking it out quickly. The fact that instead it turned into a semi-prolonged drama clashed for me with the character progression both Chloe and Red had earlier over the course of the plot. It’s the kind of dramatic misunderstanding I can accept in YA, but in adult romance like this it feels sort of contrived.

Ugh. Kids these days. How I envy them sometimes. I wish I had books like this growing up!

This was an absolutely lovely story with so much packed into it, and such a wonderful balance between dealing with the pain transphobia causes and experiencing the joy of self-discovery and settling into your skin. I found Felix an extremely relatable character between his struggles to figure out the details of his gender identity, and his worries about possibly having one marginalization too many, and how he reacted to his mother abandoning him by gravitating toward the choices that will get him hurt when it comes to feelings, and the whole big damn mess he created with that love triangle / catfishing scheme. A lot of it threw me right back into my own messy teenage years.

I really loved how flawed and messy in that uniquely teenage way all the central characters were, and how alive they all felt on the page. At the same time, some of those emotional peaks, especially in the second half of the book, sometimes made it difficult to stay immerse—which I think wasn’t so much the book’s flaw as just my experience as an adult reader. I had to remind myself that yeah, that’s exactly what teens can be like. Everything is always so extreme, so larger than life, and nope, they can’t just temper down the feelings and talk it out because they’re *still learning how to do that.* Communication is a skill, and the characters in this book definitely work on developing it in a realistic, relatable way.

There were also some structural tricks here I really liked, such as the very first scene doing so much foreshadowing in terms of everything from plot to theme, or specific scenes kind of mirroring each other, like the one where Felix has an important face-to-face conversation with Ezra while texting Declan and the one where he has an equally important face-to-face interaction with Declan while pretty much talking to Ezra in his head. At the same time, in the late part of the story, if I’m very strict, I have to admit there were some parts where the structure got sloppy-ish as the emotions heightened. I really don’t want to be strict, though. I just want to be happy this book exists. <3

Well. Oops. What an unexpected disappointment.

I’ve been really looking forward to this book specifically. So many people name it as their favorite in the Monstrous series, and I was soooo intrigued by Moth the first time I met him in The Rycke, and the combination of tropes looked right up my alley, too. I was pretty much certain I was going to love it. I almost skipped the previous book for it! And then it just… fell flat. :(

I can’t say I strongly disliked it, or anything. Despite the page count, it was a super quick read—there’s something so easily engrossing about Lily Mayne’s style, even when the events get repetitive and, at times, sort of awkwardly organized into a story. But it was such a graveyard of missed opportunities for me. The very beginning was already hard to buy. Charlie and Moth going alone to rescue Cat from that fighting ring, and everyone just being cool with it? Excuse me, but when Charlie was the one who needed to be rescued from the same damn place a few books ago, Edin and Hunter brought in Wyn to help and it was still a difficult and risky endeavor. And that was with Charlie wanting to be saved, whereas Cat had made it clear he had reasons to stay in captivity, so it was logical to assume there would be extra complications to getting him out. And you send a human and a half-monster who don’t know each other and aren’t super cooperative? When you have lots of people interested in getting Cat back and a bunch of monsters, including the one that literally all other monsters fear? Like, come on, it was super obvious that this entire premise was constructed simply to get Charlie and Moth to spend time together and fall in love, and like… it’s just so artificial.

From that point on, some things got better, but my suspension of disbelief was still buffering because of the premise, and also, a lot of the elements of the plot felt half-baked. That included the personal arcs and the relationship development, sadly—I kept waiting for the author to dig a little deeper, you know? To increase the level of negative tension between the leads and push them to explosion instead of toning it down pretty fast. To have Charlie struggle with some actual reasons to want to go back to the military despite all that he’s learned about its dark side, other than “but I don’t know what else to do and for some reason am not considering any of the potential opportunities unless I’m explicitly offered one.“ To do something interesting with those sparse chapters in Moth’s POV—I got so excited at first to see Lily Mayne branching away from the single POV setup that’s been the norm for the series, but the execution was… meh. There was one out of these few chapters that felt justified in being in this POV, otherwise, I don’t see what the POV switch achieved exactly—all the same things could have been done without leaving Charlie’s perspective. Except for providing that one really big infodump, I guess, but honestly, I could do without the big infodump.

In terms of the big plot events, they were actually super interesting as far as challenges go. I liked the plot with the cult and all the tension it contained. I really, really liked seeing more places in this world, like the raiders’ market, and Chicago, and all the small plot threads contained therein. It was great to compare society pockets ran by the raiders and the military. The overarching mystery with Cat and whoever his companion is? So intriguing and compelling. But the way Charlie and Moth went between tackling all these challenges and mysteries often retained that “artificial“ feel. Like… should they really have embarked on this journey alone? Was it necessary for anything other than giving them the space to get to know each other? What if all these big things happened not just to them, but to a team of characters including humans and monsters from previous books? What if their romance developed against the backdrop of multiple interpersonal interactions, with other people’s assumptions about them getting in the way? What if it was harder for Moth to get over Ghost? Damn, I would’ve absolutely loved that story.

Speaking of Moth getting over Ghost, ugh, the book just had to hit my absolute pet peeve.

On one hand, Moth spent all that time letting go of Ghost and letting Charlie in… but on the other hand, he concluded that hey, he wasn’t in love with Ghost at all, after all? Like, whyyyy. It’s okay to let go of feelings without diminishing them! It’s okay to be in love with more than one person at a time! This is so silly.

Come to think of it, my favorite parts were the beginning and the ending in the camp, when there were in fact multiple characters around. There were so many cool interactions. There was a bit of continued development for characters like Auri and Gloam, despite them no longer being at the center of the story. Everything was absolutely brimming with potential.

So, yeah. I liked what the story was about, but not how it was told. And I guess I’m in the complete minority for this being my least favorite book in the series so far, completely out of the blue.

This book sort of sneaked up on me. For at least a half of it, I wasn’t that invested; I only read on because it felt like a familiar, comfortable read, the kind of story I’ve already read quite a few times in more compelling iterations. And sometimes you just need to read something that’s… not at all challenging, you know? Just to give your brain a break. So I was just getting that break, fully expecting to forget these characters afterward and probably never come back to the series.

But then I started caring about Euan and his quest for revenge, despite him being only a side character. And then through him, I got invested in David and all his reasons for helping Euan. And for how stuck he felt between where he came from and where he was going, and between who he was and who he couldn’t let himself be. And for his stubborn insistence on doing the right thing, and for his belief that staying true to yourself trumps being happy—that’s the kind of philosophy that tends to resonate with me hard. And then through him, I started getting to care for Balfour, who's not just a love interest but also the perfect foil, and by their final scene together I was on the edge of my seat trying to imagine what it would take for them to become the kind of men who could, after all, make it work.

Well, I guess I’ll know from the next two books! Will the “series in progress“ section of my TBR ever stop growing? :D

An absolutely lovely read. It reminded me strongly of The House in the Cerulean Sea without the certain problematic parts. I loved the found family dynamic, the kids with their different personalities, the inclusive and diverse world of this story, the magical house and the locations around it, the magic—really, just about everything! And the balance of sweet coziness and serious feelings was just right, too.

The absolute strength here is the assortment of relationships: all the connections inside the Nowhere House, the grumpy/sunshine romance between Mika and Jamie, Mika’s complex relationship with her mentor Primrose, and more. I loved seeing all of those connections develop and strengthen. There’s so much positivity here, but it never turns saccharine; on the contrary, the story very much affirms that good things can still be complicated. Being good for each other and hurting each other aren’t mutually exclusive; it’s what you choose to do with the results that matters.

I’ve definitely got a lot of snippets from this story stuck in my head now. The whole interginerational trauma plotline/arc. Small bits of conversations characters have had: good vs nice, living vs surviving, taking the risk to let yourself be loved, making the world just a little bit better even if it can’t be all fixed in one go. And that twist in the final act??? OMG, I was so lulled into the overall sense of security, I did not see that coming and I loved how it played out. Also, there’s something absolutely haunting about the image of

bones amidst sunflowers

.

Very much recommended to anyone looking for some witchy coziness with lovable characters.

A short, quick, and lyrical read that felt to me less like a story and more like a mood. There’s a lot of body horror here, and on one hand, the way it’s all wrapped in long poetic sentences and clever similes makes it more bearable. On the other hand, the prose contains some evocative imagery that got stuck to my mind and will probably keep disturbing me for days on end.

Speaking of prose, while there are a lot of beautiful, vivid sentences here, on the whole I feel like the author overdid it a little. All those lacy figures of speech convey a mood perfectly, but sometimes obfuscate meaning and substance. And there is definitely a lot of substance here, too! I liked the horror rendition of the mermaid myth, the scary cult in taiga, the nods at numerous fairy tales, the Plague Doctor’s wry wit, and that underlying thread of how when monsters and humans co-exist, the lines blur between them and it’s no longer clear who’s the bigger monster. But I do feel that some parts of the story would have more impact if they were delivered a bit more clearly and concisely.

Still, as far as moods go, this was a beautiful one. Also, terrible and disturbing (very good for horror).

I kind of purposefully tried to read slowly, because it’s the last one in the series after all, and I’m so not ready to let this world go. But damn, this was so engrossing. Tavia Lark definitely saved the best for last—this is 100% my favorite book in the series. Yes, it could have been a bit longer, to flesh out the nuances more. Yes, it could have been a tiny bit better edited. But damn. The feels, the storylines from all the five previous books coming together, the characters, the dragons, and did I mention the feels? Also, lots of dark shit that is not at all made light of, and such a satisfying victory in the last chapters.

I suspected from the previous books in the Draskora arc that Kazia has it a lot harder than his demeanor suggests, that there are some interesting reasons and purpose behind all the chaos he causes, and that he’s the one who’s going to most confidently come out of top at the end. I turned out to be right on all accounts, but damn, I had no idea just how much darker his life is, and there were so many surprises about his plots and both the level and the… flavor? method? of his involvement. It’s a good feeling when you can be simultaneously surprised by each twist you face and proud of having called it.

It was great to know Lucien better, as well, and his relationship with Kazia is just another example of exceeded expectations. There were so many ways this specific type of set-up could go wrong in the “nope, can’t ship it, can’t read it“ way for me, and yet instead I was only getting more hooked with every chapter. I also loved how all the leads from the series got cameos at the very least, particularly Whisper’s active presence.

All in all, simply a wonderful conclusion to a series that hit all the right notes for me. The only big complaint I have is that it’s ended!