Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
This book hooked me from the very beginning with two very simple things: the warnings before the book and the first line of Ch. 1. I really appreciate that more and more authors & publishers are putting content warnings before books start so readers aren’t blindsided by things like death and abuse – to me, it makes it a more enjoyable reading experience if I go into scenes that feel like they could lead to xyz thing and know that it is likely, and know that there will be a HEA/HFN still most likely. (Obviously, things like death are much more likely in horror books, but in a romance book I am reading, I like the warning. PTSD is real and warnings hurt no one.) So the warnings before the book started, alluding to potentially big painful topics for some people, gives this book an A+ for caring.
Then it immediately goes to Ch. 1 where it starts, “Backpfeifengesicht, German, ‘a face badly in need of a fist.'” This got me immediately as this is one of my favorite words, and not many people know it. It actually became a trend in the book, with each chapter starting with a word in a language other than English, telling the language, and its definition – which subsequently implied a bit of how the chapter would go. I laughed out loud reading this first sentence, and I knew I would be recording all of the words and improving my vocabulary with them – and I have since highlighted each chapter title in this book.
The story itself is sweet, if not slightly predicable in the way that most HEA/HFN romances are – which is what you absolutely need sometimes (I did, which is why I had started reading this when I did). This is the second book in a set, which I learned after reading this one, but I can say that it did not impact my reading of this book. Do I see where I could have learned more about characters and some other things might have made a bit more sense? Sure, but this also does a great job of being a standalone. I was rooting for everyone in this book, and I was really happy with how things ended up falling into place. I now need to seek out book 1 because I think I have an idea what the storyline is about and if it is anything like this, I know I will enjoy it. 4.5/5