Meg

From the book's description, you are led to believe it is a story about magic, zombies, and love, but it lacks all of those in every account. It is established early on, as well as in the book description, that magic is the reason for zombies, or as the book calls them, cadaveri. This is repeated pretty often, and only one person seems to mildly care for a couple of pages before everyone just ignores it. Given the prevalence of magic use, and since nobody cares, you would imagine the cadaveri play a huge part in the story, but aside from the first few pages, they make maybe two appearances for the rest of the book. They are referred to in the world often, but a big theme throughout this book is that nobody really cares about anything.

Even the characters don't seem to care for each other. Silvie is injured and loses her magic, and it would seem like this is an unheard of occurrence to lose magic, but nobody ever talks to her about it or even asks how she is injured in the first place, let alone how she feels about all of it. The same goes for Silvie talking to Azura. They do not seem to ever get to know the other person, and by the end it feels like they like each other because the book demands it.

The world building is confusing, as it seems magic comes later for humans, following our world history of the Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials, but also has textbooks with the Sunday comics featuring boomer humor while still being in a more medieval time period. The magic makes no sense. It seems to be elemental-based, but Silvie controls a wolf within the first couple of pages, and then no other magic user does so again. Runes make an appearance at one point, but it genuinely feels like the only purpose magic serves is to do whatever is required for the plot. Speaking of plot, the book does not seem to have one for the first 80% of the story.

Overall, it reads like a draft. The book does a lot of telling without showing and lays it down thick with multiple paragraphs explaining exactly what is happening in a character's head. Not the end of the world, but the eBook copy also had a couple of spelling mistakes throughout, which also gave a draft-like feeling.

The book starts with some interesting concepts, especially with the worldbuilding, and really hooked me at first, but it really falls off by the midway point. By the midway point, the book starts to read like a fan fiction. You start to get some fluff chapters that feel like they were put in just to remind the reader that this is a romance. Speaking of which, this book is not a romance or at least not a sapphic one. The description of the book claims that it is a "sapphic enemies-to-lovers slow burn romance," but it is such a slow burn that romance for the main character does not even happen in the book. It does not even check off the enemies part of that claim, either, in my opinion.

The dialogue is also very strange often, and characters act in ways that seem very illogical for the moment. There were many times I audibly said to myself, "Why are they saying this?" The book also has five different POVs, but I think it should have been condensed to one or two. I especially did not enjoy jumping POVs mid-chapter. The book also skips time a lot. With weeks going by at a time, and nothing happens. Just like, "three weeks went by," and given the context of the scene, *something* should have happened during that time, but a single sentence sends you hurtling through time mid-page. Also, the book does quite a lot of telling. With sentences like, "she felt EMOTION because he said THING to her which reminded her of EVENT". Sometimes it even takes place over multiple sentences, just telling the reader.

Now, after saying all of this, I did not hate it. I think it really picks up towards the end, but even by the ending, I was left feeling like "really?" I also think it's something that the whole series came out within three months of the previous book. (April, July, October). As of writing, I have not read the rest of the series, but seeing how soon the other books released, it just leaves me feeling like maybe it was rushed or that the whole series was already written and the author did not want to go back and change things.

Maybe I am just looking too much into what is quite clear a smut book, but overall I was just glad once the book was finished.

First, the main character’s magic felt like a major cop-out. Instead of having clear rules, her powers just conveniently did whatever the plot needed at any given moment. It made any tension or stakes meaningless because you knew she’d just magic her way out of it.

On top of that, the main character seemed to randomly know things she absolutely shouldn’t. At one point, she somehow understood monster traditions with no prior exposure or explanation.

The characters themselves didn’t help matters either. One relationship in particular jumped from dislike to love interest in the span of two short chapters, with no real development. It made the romance feel rushed and unbelievable.

And for a book that promised monsters, I was left disappointed. Instead, most of the "monsters" were basically just muscled men with a monster feature slapped on. It was disappointing as I was promised monsters.