This one was a bit of a trudge at times. I love the story, the sons of Lucifer looking for the other half of their souls, the nuance it can have for each of them. I love that they each have different roles in the underworld and that opens it up for each of their stories to be told.

Arafel (though I truly loathe that name) is a great “protector” MMC, and he’s got the devotion down. Although for a Lord of the Underworld, my guy seems to have no idea what he’s doing. But he peels pears for her, which he did once, I don’t even remember it happened it just sounded like he was eating a pear and then gave her one, but we literally never stop hearing about. He forbids himself from succumbing to his temptation for Lucia…for a few pages. There’s a rule that you can’t have a relationship with anyone from the living world and it seems super important for a chapter and then nope we’re just throwing that out the window, immediately, and never addressing it again. Zero consequences after that, which just leads you to ask, why have it at all? It brings in opposition to the match in storytelling terms, but meant nothing.

Lucia is a bit all over the place. I really couldn’t peg down a personality type for this FMC. There’s a lot of her telling how she is vs the book showing how she is. We get nothing from her normal life after after her mother passes and it’s just weirdly fine and dandy that she up and left to go to the underworld (then [spoiler] she goes back for a minute and literally everything is fine? Like she hadn’t disappeared for weeks? Months? Honestly, the timeline isn’t clear). I wish we could’ve spent more time in Lucia’s house in the underworld, those scenes showed a lot more of her personality than most of the rest of the book did and it was very short lived.

It’s got a lot of contradictions. The books she claims to “call to her” but were actually initially given to her by someone? The first by the librarian and the second by Kharon. Then a few pages later she’s like “these books came to me for a reason”??? Weird power placement there. That happens a few times, when something is said and then she contradicts it a few pages later. She spends so much of this book crying (understandably so) and then near the end makes an odd comment “I never cry.” Like girl, yes you do, you cry constantly. Things like that.

This book could have used about another dozen rounds of editing. It was all over the place. Random capitalized words in the middle of a sentence, misspellings everywhere, sentences that just didn’t make sense, repetitive descriptions and statements, it needs a lot of work. The formatting also drove me absolutely crazy. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the text wasn’t formatted to fit flush with the margins of the page. That’s more of a personal preference, it just makes the text look choppy to me. Like a draft you wrote in Word without formatting it.

I’m still going to read the next one, I’m curious and I like reading newer indie authors. We’ll see how that one goes!