miolla's reviews
236 reviews

It's disturbing and heartwarming at the same time. The heroine's tragic and highly traumatic backstory was too over the top for this kind of erotic novella. It was needless as well, her stumped emotions could've been explained in other ways.

I liked Jax in the previous books, but was disappointed with his story. It should've been more sordid, scandalous and mischievous than this boring try at wholesome healing. The heroine is fine, she had some moments, but the story overall is bleh. Too focused on the heroine's utter devotion, passion and love for children and family for my taste. Also, being a 3rd grade teacher doesn't as such explain her obviously intended deep knowledge in child psychology. I know this kind of novellas aren't literary masterpieces, but even an addition of special education teacher/ social worker would've made more sense as backstory.

An engaging story with really good audiobook narrators. The audiobook app unfortunately had this categorized as romance, which is why I was left feeling quite unsatisfied. I did some research and apparently the second book is romance, which could explain the situation. If I'd picked this up as  a dark fantasy book with a romantic subplot, I probably wouldn't have been disappointed. So for other romance seekers beware: this can not even be categorized as slow burn in my opinion, since the romance is so sporadic and even crudely put on hold for the second half of the book in order for the development of other, I can only assume important in the future, characters and worldbuilding.

The world in this book is cruel, grim and bleak, but the author manages to embed a hopeful vibe, without it being too unbelievable. Something similar to N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy, but not as masterful.

The plot and setting does do an unexpected switch halfway from a pure fantasy realm to modern day USA, with some cliché "alien first time on Earth"-moments. Pay attention to the blurb, which in hindsight is pretty telling. The heroine changes to this vigilante, which is okay I guess, but I probably wouldn't have picked this up if I'd known the change of setting. 

Warning for fellow audiobook -listeners: they switched narrators for the third book in the series and based on the reviews it's bad. 

I don't read contemporary romance, so it's not a wonder I DNFd. The only reason I stuck with it even this long was Alex Kydd's yummy Irish brogue. Gus was just cringey, which was probably emphasized by the chosen narrator.