Why didn't I enjoy this? I wanted to enjoy this so much, especially since the premise sounded so intriguing.

Cons:

× The entire "love at first sight" thing. Ugh. Characters do not have to declare love at first sight for it to be love at first sight. And I'm talking legit, she never saw him before, looked at him for a few seconds and had an instant connection at first sight thing. I kept reading about how she had felt drawn to him, waiting for some reasonable explanation (god, I would have even accepted the mates trope), but uh...nope. Just your typical YA female heroine falling for a guy in 0.5 seconds.

× Darcy trusts the "new hot guy" because -- even though her gut is telling her not to -- "she feels a connection to him" without knowing anything about him.

× I literally could not tell you why Darcy and Conn are attracted to one another or why they fall for each other. Other than their love for poetry, and Darcy's constant need to tell us about the unexplained "connection" between them, there is literally nothing between them. No chemistry, no sparks, I don't even think they're physically attracted to each other (hell, in the beginning, Darcy admits he's good looking but not what she goes for in physical appearances). I personally love the enemies to lovers trope, but it really doesn't work here. You can't just take two enemies, give them a similar hobby / interest, have them interact off and on, and then smoosh them together. When they finally did things outside of the mission, I just didn't feel or understand what drew them together.

× Freaking Orion, good god I hate the cliche that was his character.

Spoiler

Was it so hard just to keep him as the supportive new friend she makes instead of the guy-turned-creep who gets jealous and nasty when she rejects his advances?

× Darcy keeps saying how much she hates Shades when didn't even know about them until recently. Considering she hates them so much, I'm surprised

Spoiler

she doesn't have self loathing problems because, you know, she's a shade

. She also agreed her parents were "evil", which don't get me wrong, what they did was awful and horrible. But she seemed to genuinely love them and knew what they did before her incident (she even wanted to help them!). So Darcy kind of pissed me off with her high and mighty act when it came to shades vs humans, believing humans were "better" or the "good guys" in the grand scheme despite everything she had experienced and learned firsthand. Because no one was really "good" here. This was literally just two species who couldn't get along or were fearful of the other, which led them to do awful/horrible things to each other. It's almost like the story is supposed to be morally gray but the main character is trying to force her belief of "humans good, shades evil" down our throats repeatedly.

× After getting over half way into this book, I kind of kept losing interest to keep picking it back up. This is something of a problem I have with books over 400 pages, because they either drag out the plot or have the MC just run around doing idle things that don't add much overall to the plot. Now, I don't feel the plot drags here per se, but I don't think I would feel like anything was genuinely missing if this story had been roughly 100 or so pages shorter.

× We have three guys pining after Darcy. One of those guys we don't even learn about him being infatuated with her until the near end.

× I skimmed the last few chapters or so and I know I may have missed something, but what happened to Orion and the others? And what about the peace treaty that the other Shades were trying to do?

× True wuv saves the day. Literally.


Pros:

× That cover. I would die for that cover, it's gorgeous.

× Interesting concept. I liked the parallel worlds and how things were the same yet also different.

× Darcy's friends and adoptive mother were awesome and deserved more screentime. I'm sad they didn't get more of a role in the story.

× It was nice to have the heroine be the supernatural one where the guy is just a regular human.

× This is a stand alone book (I don't know why goodreads lists it as the first book in a series).


This book is sadly a miss for me. I really thought I would enjoy it more, especially since I really loved this authors The Midnight Lie, but I guess not.