Thank you to NetGalley and Harper 360 for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review!

This book tells the story of Emilia Raven, a human heir to her vampire parents who chafes at the expectations put upon her and longs to experience human life. She gets a new vampire bodyguard, Kyle, and they fall in love and along the way Emilia figures out many things about herself and the world she lives in.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I am a sucker for a vampire romance (as has already been established many times), and I was hopeful that this book would scratch that itch for me. But our vampire love interest, Kyle, has zero personality, and the romance is not so much enemies-to-lovers as complete insta love that happened so fast it confused me. The author could have done a lot more with the world-building - the times in the book where Emilia learns about how humans lived and the politics were really interesting, but they were few and far between and did not feel fleshed-out enough. Emilia struck me as childish, her parents as weirdly one-dimensional (her father's shift from being incredibly cold and angry towards her and then very loving really was head-spinning), and Kyle an almost cartoonishly "perfect" hero with no backstory or depth. The last 25% of the book felt like it completely careened, and I got so lost. The story had a lot of promise, and maybe the second book will be better, but this one was a disappointment.

I'm glad Emilia killed Kyle because their relationship meant nothing to me, but I was so confused about how distraught she was by his betrayal when realistically they'd only known each other for a couple weeks and she really knew nothing about him. Obviously it was supposed to feel like this big connection, but that was told to us instead of shown - I didn't feel it at all. I think it could have been stronger if the author had had Emilia really reckon with why she fell instantly in love with Kyle, and what he represented to her: freedom, specialness, difference, etc. There could have been a lot of emotional growth there, but it just didn't get there.