This book completely captured my heart. It's extremely difficult to create an entire race of people, their world, their culture, their magic and beliefs and make it so believable and real that it becomes a seamless narrative that flows along as if it has always existed.

From the very first chapter, I felt this whole world surrounding me, pulling me into its visceral and ephemeral clutches. There was no effort needed to remember tons of information, you're just swept up in the beauty and magic of these entities and their lives, loves and losses. I really enjoyed the characters and am looking forward to seeing where circumstances take them next. And after the heart stopping, action packed ending, we're still left with a jaw-dropping moment that immediately made me wish for book two. If you're looking to sink into the pages of a story that will captivate you and take you away with it for several days, look no further. This one's for you. ( )

Charlotte Valois is the heir to the Sky-throne of a Daeva kingdom who finds her parents murdered and Aurek, the man she’s betrothed to, with the corpse of her father. Not wanting to share her parents’ fate, she flees from him, taking her baby sister and heading through a portal to our world. Once there, she seals away her element, which gives her strong magical powers but would make it easy for Aurek to find her again. After some time with a clan of Daeva who never left this world, she uses what magic she still has to establish a life for herself as a human named Charlotte Blanchette and eventually get a job as a massage therapist. While more Daeva arrive in this world and are open about their presence, she is able to remain hidden until she’s hired to help a Siren who’s had an injury heal poorly; while leaving the first appointment, she catches a glimpse of Aurek as he arrives at the house. She then has to deal with trying to protect herself and her sister Allison from him by stopping him from actually noticing them, deal with a separate threat that shows up, and handle her growing feelings for a Daeva named Hunter who the head of the tribe she spent time with assigns to guard her.

The story is mostly told from Charlotte’s viewpoint, which can lead to things getting somewhat confusing when someone messes with her mind (an ally of Aurek at one point and an agent of the other threat at another). Some (maybe a quarter to a third) of the story is told from Aurek’s viewpoint, making it clearer to the reader what’s going on in some areas that Charlotte is unaware of. Just who and what the other threat really is and what they’re doing remains somewhat unclear even at the end of the book, however.

That brings me to one of my issues with this book: it isn’t a complete story or even a satisfying part of one. By the end, one major conflict has possibly started to be resolved, another has only started to even be explained, one character is recovering from a significant injury and is unconscious, another might or might not survive the results of an attack, the matter of unsealing Charlotte’s element remains lacking even a hint of a solution, and a revelation about the other threat has just come out of left field in the last sentence.

Another issue is that it seems like all of Charlotte’s decisions seem to not just be wrong due to information she lacks, but wind up being the worst thing she could do. For example, her attempt to use magic to heal an injury that someone has suffered at the hands of an agent of the other threat accelerates a magical contamination even as it lessens the actual injury.

Also, while the story makes it clear why he’s doing it, the actions of one character to deceive another about something are at best somewhat creepy given the results of them. Some of the other characters who know what he’s doing do call him out on his keeping up the deception without any plan on when or how he’ll reveal the truth, but only in a ‘when are you going to tell her the truth?’ way. This might have been less creepy if the reader had been as much in the dark as the character being deceived, but I’m not sure.

This is probably more due to my age, but almost every single pop culture reference went over my head. (If the reference to the jalapeño hadn’t been the first or second one to show up, it’d have been an ‘I understood that reference’ moment for me.) While being able to recognize only one song by any member of a list of half a dozen artists (and not the song mentioned by name) didn’t result in anything more than me lacking the soundtrack to a scene, Charlotte comparing herself to a character I’ve never heard of leaves me completely confused on what she’s talking about.

Finally, there are the errors. While none of them are bad enough to actually hurt the story, they are distracting in the aggregate. Early on, while thinking about the arrival of the Daeva in this world, Charlotte mentions their actions showing up on social media like Twitter and YouTube pretty much right away, then how the Soviet Union had been unhappy about all of the Daeva showing up in the U.S. (For those unclear on the problem, the Soviet Union ceased to exist long before YouTube, Twitter, and the like existed.) Charlotte also more than once says she ‘startled’ at something that surprised her; she might have been startled, but her physical action would have been that she started at it. Last, but not least, almost every time something is described as ‘viscous,’ it should be ‘vicious.’ ( )

I received a copy of this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers in exchange for an unbiased review.

The plot summary of this book had so much potential! It fell really flat for me though. It just didn't have any stakes. I didn't know why we cared about the girl or her world or why I should be rooting for her. The writing was a bit clunky in spots, but mostly was a really enjoyable style. I was hoping for a lot more from the "enemies to lovers" romance. It wasn't a romance, and I'm not sure how they fell in love. ( )