Such a lovely read! It goes right on my special “awful unlikable characters find love and become better people in the process“ shelf. It’s not a very big shelf, but I love it dearly. Oh, and also, it’s a wonderful cozy romantasy with some really nice worldbuilding—I’d love to see it explored further in some slightly higher-stakes stories, by the way. All these gods!

It’s essentially a story about a bitter, hissy black cat of a man who clings to the past and the negativity and keeps his golden retriever certainly-not-a-boyfriend at arm’s length, pushing him away and hurting them both—until it all gets too much and he tries to run away from it all. Except there’s a goddess conveniently ready to meddle, and so this is where the story more or less starts, instead of ending.

It is also a story about resolving long-standing misunderstandings in a painfully, beautifully realistic way. An exchange of profuse apologies and detailed explanations isn’t a culmination of the journey, it’s more like the next step after the inciting incident. What comes after is a long road with intermediary victories and failures, mistakes made and fixed by all parties involved, and, eventually, lots of personal growth. The kind that doesn’t change who you are, just how you act and think.

I admit at some points of the story I was vaguely uncomfortable with the dynamics between the leads. While I liked Tam’s specific brand of being an unlikable asshole in terms of reading about him, I felt sometimes that maybe Nicolau was giving him too many chances, letting him in too much even when asserting boundaries. Maybe, just maybe, Nicolau would in fact be better off without him. But then the story kept progressing, the characters kept developing and opening up, and it became so clear how both of them had flaws, and how those flaws clashed and matched, and what both of them were getting out of their existing arrangements—as well as what sort of changes both of them craved. The more I got to know these two, the harder it was not to root for them.

Also! Just like A Taste of Iron and Gold (despite being a very different book in tone), this one has a vibe of a fanfic written for a fandom that only existed in Alexandra Rowland’s head, and I’m so here for that. Those are the best vibes.