The queer romance was nice, but it didn't live to its magical potential.
Thank you NetGalley for providing an ARC.

This sounded like a really fun premise with the whole forced proximity and magic egg baby (are the egg babies things still a real thing?? I went to high school in the early aughts and that is definitely not something I experienced!), but the writing did not work for me at all. This just wasn't my kind of book after all.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book, as this book has already been published, I will not share my review on Netgalley at this time.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc :)

love the characters and the plot, this is such a charming and funny book. I really appreciated how it emphasized the value of communication and the importance of just being yourself. Elliot and Tim were amazing characters. I also thought it was great how their bond helped to shape them. The way the trope of almost fake dating was used also made this book so entertaining to read. It's always entertaining to read about or watch the egg baby challenge, and I really appreciated how this whole thing was handled to ensure that all the details were there without being overbearing. It ensured that this novel had a good pace.
I definitely recommend this book to romance lovers, and queer readers :)

This was a fun queer romance story with a little magic thrown in. The magic system was not clearly explained at times and seemed to be secondary to the story (it was). But it was a cute story. I didn't see the comparison to The Magicians beyond the magical academy. Plus it is certainly not as dark! Enjoyable.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Magical Boarding School in New Zealand with a whole bunch of diverse and queer characters? SIGN ME UP! This is what I hoped it would be and more! I am utterly obsessed!

4.5 / idiots to lovers done to perfection. there were definitely some parts I wish were fleshed out more, like the whole magical boarding school, but this was just a really cute read overall! this read similarly to a fanfic but the best parts of one. i read this all in one day since it was so addictive.

This book is a delight.
If you like Carry On, Boyfriend Material and A Deadly Education and wish they could sort of smoosh together into one, this is the book for you.
I am here for a magical school being hidden under Fox Glacier, thank you very much, and I hope we get more books set in this world for I am now bereft.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital ARC 🤩
Also if you are from outside NZ, all the chapter titles are iconic New Zealand songs and you should look up each one as you read for a really good time.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book included a wonderful set of characters. I love the plot and the setting of the story. I had such a great time reading this one. Highly recommend.

I love books in magic school settings and this one was so fun! I enjoyed the voice of the narrator, Tim. He was sarcastic but had a good heart. The romance was adorable with just enough intrigue to keep me reading!

Just a wonderful read that made me smile throughout. Fabulous characters, wonderfully unique setting and a completely charming story - my only complaint is that it ended too soon. Please write more!

I LOVED this book!! I thought it would be contemporary but it turned out to be...magical-realism? urban fantasy? Idk what to call it but I really loved it.
The pining, the funny scenes, the friend group, everything was amazing 🤌🏼
Highly recommend it if you like:
- books not set in US
- rivals to rivals-with-benefits to lovers
- lots of humor and silly adventures

Tim Te Maro and the Subterranean Heartsick Blues interested me a lot, since it's set in New Zealand. The most I enjoyed the little cultural things, although they weren't really explained, which was a bummer (I had to find the info on my own). Tim and Elliot are rivals of sort in a magical boarding school. They are both dumped and end up joining their forces for a school project in which they need to raise an egg baby together and not kill it. Thanks to the school assignment Tim finally catches he's bi and the boys end up being sex friends. Except they will fall in love, since duh. There's hardly anything happening in the book and there's only little magic, which bothered me. In a sense there's too much different things in the book to make it coherent fully. There's magic only in name and the egg baby thing feels weird too, not to forget the absent dad and suddenly being married, but too drunk to remember. Too little and too much at the same time.

I would've ditched the magic right from the start, since this would've worked better without it. Also, less egg baby time and more actually getting to know one another. Too much just thinking about getting off and not real encounters. Too little, too much. Such an unbalance. The book is still quite good and cute, but it could've been a lot better. Points for the country though!

I’m conflicted by this book 😂. Because the enemies to lovers rom-com lover in me is like “aw so cute.” Because the rom-com storyline was adorable. But like everything surrounding was a bit messy and unfinished, and the ending was a bit rushed, and the beginning was rushed, and there was a lot of rushed things.

The writing style in terms of the romance piece was very similar to that of Casey McQuiston, but toned down because this is young adult, but on the higher age demographic of YA, the characters are almost 18.

But the rest? There was a very rushed start, things move very quickly, suddenly Elliot and Tim have agreed to partner on this project because their ex’s have gotten together and they want to make them mad. Okay, totally fine. But there is this magical element in this book that just never clicked for me?

It felt like it was never fully explained in a way that j could grasp. Things were talked about and terms were mentioned and there was like some brief explanations, but I couldn’t make sense of a lot of it and it kept bugging me because I was trying to figure out if it would play out in the story at all.

And when it finally did this book took a weird turn and the second half was a strange choice 😂. Like these are still teenagers and they’re still in like a boarding magical school type thing and everyone is just sort of an afterthought or a background to Elliot and Tim’s growing relationship.

And that’s FINE, like we can have a rom-com YA at a boarding school and everything in this book could have been the same and just more fleshed out and the magic could have been removed and I would not have blinked an eye about it 😂.

Because Elliot and Tim’s characters outshine everything else in this book. The dialogue is funny and natural, and that is clearly where the author spent most of her time and that’s why at the end you’re like “Awwwww!” And you just sort of forget how messy the rest of it was 😂.

Overall this was a fun, quick read, despite the mess. 🤣

Thank you Netgalley and Publisher for this advanced copy.

Tim Te Maro and Subterranean Heartsick Blues was so so so adorable!! The story was cute and simple, yet not boring at all. This was a comfort read for me

This was a very sweet and lighthearted YA magical romance. The romance was definitely central, you only got a very light idea of the magic and any events prior to the start of the novel. It had a kind of fanfiction vibe, with slightly familiar characters and dynamics in a magic school, but the characters were individuated and interesting, the New Zealand location and cultures added a fresh spin, and most of all the actual—possibly completely unprecedented?!—presence of real parents and family relationship dynamics in a story about a magic boarding school was really unique.

First, thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Okay. Y'all. This book was FUN. It was light with a bit of mystery, lots of fun tropes, a magical boarding school, queer romance, and full of sheer delight. I had so much fun reading this one and will reread it the next time I need a little pick-me-up. The way H. S. Valley wrote is befitting of the audience but also very dedicated to and befitting of the story itself. It's a book that makes you smile, and I can't wait to add it to my shelves!

5/5

This has to be one of the most hilarious yet full of underlying taboo themes I read so far!

Magic x LGBTQIA+ combination can never go wrong. I truly enjoyed readibg rhe POVs of the MCs. Despite the fact that they are teenagers, their character development was awesome- meaning, nit your typical teenage brattiness and angst (well, except for that one time, lol)

I just wished the plot was more solidified up until the end BUT i still enjoyed reading this immensely!

This was a pretty cute story, featuring an egg baby and a friends-with-benefits turned more romance. I enjoyed seeing Tim and Elliot bond over being pretend parents and it was sweet how much they ended up caring for their egg daughter.

I was a bit worried that the plot might be too simple, but then we were thrown for a loop in the last third and it was a nice way to keep things interesting and moving along. I appreciated that it helped Tim realize exactly what he was feeling for Elliot, even if it wasn't necessarily fully explained.

There was a lack of worldbuilding and we didn't get to see much magic either. We're told there are magic users out there and, as far as I could tell, there are regular humans that aren't aware of magic. There are many types of magic users and I wish we'd had better examples of them and seen our characters use magic more in this.

The last thing that I didn't love was not finding out more about Tim's dad and why he left. We knew he abandoned his family, but there were no explanations as to why and the ending just glossed over it. Why set that up if you aren't going into detail or bothering to really resolve it?

A good read overall and Tim and Elliot are pretty adorable.

I voluntarily read and reviewed this book. All opinions are my own. Thank you to Hardie Grant Children's Publishing and NetGalley for the copy

This one is really fluffy and sweet, there's barely any angst and honestly it worked for this story really well! The love story is sweet and it's all very lighthearted. However, why was this set in a magical boarding school? It added almost nothing to the plot except for the plot twist about halfway through, but other than that it was really unnecessary - at the very least, it needed some serious worldbuilding because most of the magic system is not explained whatsoever, and the story would have worked perfectly well on its own without the added fantasy elements. It just felt like the plot and world had opportunities to go to places where some oomph could have been added, but just fell short. However, I did like the two main characters and thought that their romance was pretty cute.