Tavia LarkCritiques

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.

Nice. This is not overly complicated, relatively light- hearted (considering the subject matter of dead bodies and demons). Characters are nice, and they are sweet together.

This is a fantastic opposites-attract romance, and has one of the best-done separations I've ever read. The world is great without ever being tedious. I am impressed. Book 2 comes out in December.

CW: self-harm for blood magic; many deaths.

Delightful. Great characters, great plot, abundant humor and angst and danger and falling in love and mistakes and I read the last third without stopping, which means the pacing is excellent. This one's as good as the first one and as different and yeah. Read these!

Before I read the first book in this series, I was unaware of a way to make me like a series with gods in it. I've tried several, and while I finished reading some of them, they were problematic for me. But this series is exactly the kind of gods content I didn't know I wanted.

AND, these characters are unique and interesting and fun, and the author's craft is excellent, and so yes, I will be reading all these as soon as each one comes out!

I've enjoyed all three of these books so much; Lark had some kind of direct line to Terri's Ideal Fantasy Romance Series with the great characters and the exemplary worldbuilding. I enjoy the author's prose and humor, and she can write a good sex scene--mostly because it's clear that they're love scenes, whether the characters are there yet or not.

This particular pair has been at odds the entire time, so nothing's easy. Until it finally is. Before all hells break loose. I look forward to reading them all again in a few years.

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.

If you're looking for something sweet and low-angst, try this. It's short, predictable, and pretty. :)

What a fantastic novel. Hurricane Ian prevented me from typing out a review when I finished, but we just got power restored THANK YOU TECO CREWS so I can now say there is a little plot hole, but you won't care. If you've enjoyed the first book, you'll enjoy this one. And the blurb at the end for #3 kinda made my eyes cross, so. Yeah.

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.