one of my booktwt mutuals recommended me the 2nd book of this series but i decided to blindly go for the first one instead, because it felt more logical to me.

in retrospect, i found myself enjoying this book but i think i liked the subplots better than the main romance plot. 

i guess it is mainly because i might be somewhere in the ace spectrum, but i just will never understand how two total strangers can hook up and then feeling like they have a special connection without barely speaking to each other ??? ofc by the end i thought their relationship was cute and i liked how they kept bringing parts of each other in their own world. but yeah i think i would have loved the romance part better if it was more of a slow burn and less spicy. and maybe if daniel (mmc) was a bit more flawed? like he was... too perfect 😭 and i know that is usually the point in romance books, but in this one it felt weird, since everyone else had their own issues.

i think the stories going on in wakan were nice; i love me some found family vibes lmao. at first i felt like the village characters were a bit one-dimensional but i believe that was mainly because their descriptions came from alexis' pov and in her world everybody is pretty shallow, so i guess i can understand why said descriptions were that way.

but i liked to see how throughout the narration we could see the similarities of the royaume with the grant house and how they're both kingdoms in their own way and how both characters felt somehow trapped in them at some point or another in the story

moreover, the exploration of the so many forms of abuse that exist was interesting.

and i like how it was not only shown in the neil-alexis and the liz-jake situation but also in amber-daniel, alexis-cecil, jennifer-cecil. and i also liked how each situation was talked about differently because of the characters' positions on it. and it was nice to see neil taking accountability for his actions by the end, without forcing alexis into forgiveness.

the only thing that i disliked about it was how

alexis highkey blamed her mom too for being "quiet" or "too tired to argue". just because she accepted the abuse and total control from her husband doesn't mean she did not care about him hurting her or her children

so yeah, i think my rating is actually more 3.85-ish but i dont feel like giving it 4 solid stars, so i guess it'll stay this way, with 3.75!