Sweet and uncomplicated. Emotionally a little unrealistic, but who cares? The characters are competent and lovely, the story is simple, but engaging, and the love is charming. ( )

Wow.

Terrific characters who have no future together connect amidst growing intrigue and increasing dangers, including to each other, tension increasing with every plot twist--what a great story. Solid five star story, characters, and tensions.

I didn't care about the last chapter, but am intrigued by the hints of book 2 in the epilogue. I've already pre-ordered it. ( )

dnf @ 40%

After the first few chapters — not long after the two MCs met, but I will come to that in a minute — I rapidly began to lose interest.

The first red — well, maybe orange — flag for me was the way this book’s written. It’s supposedly ‘high fantasy,’ but I’d take simple ‘fantasy,’ or even ‘low fantasy’ — is that a thing? — over this any day if it’s written the right way. I apologize for this simplistic explanation, but if there are princes, and kingdoms, and dragons, and giant magical green and blue cats (yes), I do not want the characters using stupid modern slang! I want just a bit of that otherworldly feeling, is that too much to ask? Otherwise, it’s just like urban fantasy centered around some royal family, and that is not my thing at all.

Okay, back to our MCs. Everything pretty much went downhill the moment they saw each other. I (don't) get it, the author wanted to write a ‘love story’ centered around two beautiful, outwardly perfect specimens of their kind, but do they really have to wax poetic about various features/body parts every time they meet? Rinse, repeat. Ad nauseam. Literally. The thing is, despite this abundance of flowery, purple-prosey ruminations about each other’s attractiveness, I didn’t actually see the attraction? Mostly, it reminded me of my first forays into the ‘romance’ genre when I was a young teen and thought Bella and Edward were the shit.

I tried to grit my teeth and bear it, to wait and see if there’d be some more worldbuilding, or an explanation of the hereditary magic, and was rewarded with more flowery descriptions of eyes, skin, and whateverthefuck. Pass.