Quirky and light, with amusing characters and family dynamics, a romantic Old Western fantasy setting (“Evening, Marshal!” *tips hat*) and a clever mythology. I enjoyed the main characters and their various sidekicks very much, though I rolled my eyes mightily at a late-breaking, maddeningly melodramatic, soap opera-esque ending to the “enemies-to-lovers” trope. The POV characters took turns being assholes and five minutes of direct conversation would have made the last third of the book far shorter and less irritating. There’s an ongoing Unknown Correspondent trope, too, which raises some serious doubts about the intelligence of the female lead.

I was mostly charmed by the fantasy world, though I raised my eyebrows at some of the overlap between our world and the fictional one. For example, one of the main characters uses the phrase “lather, rinse, repeat,” which jarred me right of my happy immersion in the author’s world. Names are largely European derived and  for the most part characters read as “white” which may further the American “Western” vibe for some readers (as long as you don’t think too deeply about the real Old West, which was peopled by North and South Americans, Asians, Africans, and Europeans. For a given value of “real,” I grant you.) There’s a character with a vaguely Hispanic last name but she never appears onstage, and of course, the name is still European in origin. 

Much of the satisfying lack of homophobia (same sex relationships are common and unremarkable) is sadly undermined by the plentiful misogyny. A pregnant character is described in an almost caricatured way: cankles, waddling, and hemorrhoids, while her labor is played for laughs: the yuck factor of her water breaking, how she swears and her father flippantly dismisses her pain as “twenty hours of yelling.” WTF 😳  The male lead thinks of the woman main character largely in terms of her “fucking magnificent” boobs and other curves. Even though women seem to wield plenty of authority (they are law enforcement, doctors, zombie hunters) apparently a woman undertaker and business owner is a bridge too far: “Damn women have no business in undertaking anyhow!” 

I’ll take a look at later installments in the series and see if some of these issues are resolved.