From Lukov with Love

DNF @ 50%
Potentially a soft DNF, as I've loved a few Mariana Zapata books, and I want to love this as well!
I'm just finding this is becoming somewhat of a chore to get through, and I'd rather pick up something more compelling, rather than skimming large chunks of this. MZ books tend to either really work for me, or be wayyy too slow-paced, heavy on the inner monologue, and needlessly wordy, and this is starting to feel like it may fall into the latter category.

I've run into a distracting amount of editing/grammatical errors, to the point where I've had to re-read several sentences multiple times over just to make sense of what she's actually trying to say. She also REFUSES to repeat character names throughout conversations, so rather than just saying “my mom said...” more than once in an exchange, she'll say something like “the woman who had virtually raised me and my four siblings all alone...”

Another issue I've been having is that I just haven't felt that connected to Jasmine, which hinders the experience in a single POV 500+ page romance.

Last - I'm really not a fan of Ivan using the nickname “meatball” towards Jasmine, especially coupled with all of the talk of her being on the larger side, body-wise, for a figure skater. From reading reviews, it sounds like there's no real explanation for why he refers to her that way, which makes me feel like it likely is in reference to her body? I also was grossed out by him coming off pretty dismissive of the fact that she was uncomfortable doing a nude photoshoot with him, and was worried that he would make nasty comments about her body. Since I didn't finish, this could potentially be addressed more, but I really didn't like the way he reacted during that scene, and that was the part that led me to put this one on hold.