Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
I am going to start with I have not, at this time, gotten to the end of this book. I am roughly 67% of the way through this 500 page book and I am struggling to continue. That being said, I might go back later and finish this and adjust my review, but likely not. I will list the pros & cons below.
Pros: It is a very easy read. Even though it takes place in Ireland (?) so there is clearly a dialect in the writing, it still reads smoothly, so reading dozens of pages is not difficult. I like that it switches between characters POV between chapters – that is always fun. Each character in the book has a distinct personality.
Cons: There are pages at a time of dialogue where no names are listed so it is unclear who is speaking. While each character has their own personality, their voice is not unique enough to differentiate who is speaking when four people are talking at the same time for five pages. The internal and external monologues of characters are hard to differentiate. Except sometimes the male lead will break the fourth wall and say things like, “You can tell, dear reader, that [blank]” which is very jarring considering he is the only person to do this and it doesn’t happen the first time until about 20% of the way through the book. This is supposed to be a standalone book (theoretically) but it is the third book in this world, which normally isn’t an issue, except for it is very hard to figure out what is happening at times – is this a reference to a previous book? Is it something that just isn’t being explained in this book? WHO KNOWS! It took about half of the book for a key aspect of the main characters relationship to be explained which was incredibly frustrating. Speaking of, age differences shouldn’t be an issue – and normally they aren’t – but the age difference between these characters were creepy (to me). There is a difference between “older man” and predatory, which doesn’t help when the main female character kept referring to herself as a “little girl” – in fact it makes it so much worse. Both of the main characters have flaws that they can’t get over, that probably wouldn’t be a big deal if they just had an actual conversation like adults, but neither of them can act like adults.
This book was just very difficult for me to read. I am sure there is an audience for it, and I wanted to like it based on the description & cover, but unfortunately this was just not the book for me. 1/5