Thank you to the author, City Owl Press, and NetGalley for an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Read for:
- Spice
- Half-vampire/witchy romance
- World-building

Holy plot, Batman. I went into this book excited, because the description really captured my attention. The characters and the overall lack of satisfaction in the plot and ending, however, is what makes me dock this by 2 stars. The pacing was hard to keep up with, and I felt that the chemistry between the characters went from 0 to 100 way, way too fast.

I was given an arc for this book via NetGalley and City Owl Press. This book will be available 1/23/24.

Y’all! I have read some truly bad books but this one takes the cake. I mean I read Wet Hot Allosaurus Summer for the love of unholy bunnies and I did that in a lark. This book? This a wet hot mess of incoherent plot when there is a plot because all this is is straight up schmexy times. And not even well written schmexy times. I should have DNF’d it. Like it’s not worth my time or yours. But you are the master of your own literary journey so read it if my review make you want to but this book was awful and I want my time back.

When I started reading this I was hopeful. Initially, it seemed mysterious with a touch of classic gothic horror, but all that quickly turned into great disappointment.

The two main characters in this novel are Luca and Kate, both boring and have little personalities. Given that the novel's primary is about the two of them I was impressed by how little chemistry they had. It was the definition of instant love which resulted in me never getting time to root for or connect with them.
Both of them are multiple centuries old, yet dropped everything for each other within 24 hours of meeting... Besides that the two of them never talked with each other about themselves and their life they just thought each other to be hot, which would worked differently had the novel not tried to make them seem infatuated and in love.

Besides their love and connection being nonexistent, the whole novel was chaotic and felt anything but unfinished. There was no actual plotline, too many characters without purpose, and multiple conflicts being introduced but never addressed. There is nothing in the novel that keeps be invested. The only thing it managed to do perfectly was make me frustrated and confused.

The novel contains a heavy amount of smut, but given that included so much other information too, it was hard to figure out if it was written solely to be smutty and therefore purposefully disregarded the rest as unimportant, or if the novel simply never knew what it was supposed to be. Regardless of the intention, if it was meant to be read as pure smut, that could no doubt have been executed better because this made no sense.

Thanks to the publisher City Owl Press for providing me with an advanced reading copy via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Publish date 24.01.2024.

Going into reading this book I knew what I was getting into so I had a good time. There is a lot of spice but since I assumed that ahead of time it was fun. I enjoyed the characters and thought there was chemistry there for sure. I docked two stars for the plot however as it felt really rushed and sometimes pretty confusing. I will read the next book in this series and maybe it will bring things together more

3.5/5 stars