Hated every minute of reading this book. Do not bother.
The prologue is useless and non-informative; basically just shows the FMC getting spooked by mystery magic and asking for a job transfer to the morgue. As if we needed to know why she wanted to work in the morgue when her chapter 1 thoughts about a grieving family include her noting that the deceased’s sister isn’t crying like the parents, causing her to think, “Good for her.” As if grief is some sort of flaw.
From the book blurb mentioning the FMC disliking socialization, I was really hoping for a neurodivergent or even explicitly autistic FMC, and was disappointed to find she’s basically a sad-girl/edgelord/pick-me/goth-gf type.
> I quickly shake it off to pull myself together, lifting my burrito to tear a bite out of it and chew, letting out a low moan as the guacamole within hits my tastebuds. It’s my favorite flavor. Odd, I know, but it is.
> I can just barely make out bubblegum pink hair and wrinkle my nose. Too cheery for my taste if you ask me. How anyone can stand that much is beyond me. And to have hair colored pink? Ugh. I hated it when girls did that in school, and I definitely hate it now as an adult. It’s worse.
> I also realized a long time ago that even without my abilities, I would still be the gothic chick of my class. Black and royal purple are my favorite colors, and I enjoy the darkness. I can do nice things, though, like crocheting, for example. I’m not all tainted by shadows and darkness.
Please learn to edit! Not just proofread, but get to the point. The book is so, so meandering and boring. Two chapters are dedicated to the FMC trying to warm up a burrito for lunch. Another one is just her going outside for two seconds, getting a dirty look from her preppy coworkers, seeing a taco truck and then going back inside. One chapter consists only of her riding an elevator. We don’t even get to see the meeting she was riding the elevator to attend. It just cuts to the next day at work. WTF?
By the way, I hope you’re not an emetophobe because guess what? It gets nasty. The FMC’s reaction to being sick in front of her crush and losing her phone is so over-the-top and weird. She trips and falls in a pile of her own … you know … but honestly if this happened IRL at a hospital, your coworkers (even the fake blondes who lowkey hate you) would probably rush over, help you up, walk you to the nearest shower, bring you fresh scrubs, and offer to drive you home or call you an Uber. (And then later gossip about you, but whatever.) They definitely wouldn’t just stare at you, go “u ok?” and then let you run off like a cartoon character. But that’s what the FMC does, and when she realizes she’s lost her phone, she is like “welp, if my crush has it, guess I better transfer immediately because my life is over. All my erotic friend fiction is in the notes app and I don’t have a password to my phone, so he’s probably reading my secrets right now. JK I’ll keep this job lol I love working at a place where everyone hates me”
There are so many plot holes and mistakes. She is encouraged by her ex-friend to go to a Halloween ball she hasn’t even heard about (literally “you should go!” And “get out of that crummy morgue for once!”) and then two chapters later casually mentions that the ball was mandatory. She loses her phone in one chapter and then has her phone in her purse in another, and then gets her phone returned to her later. She makes a deal with someone to remove a hex, but tells them they’ll have to find the reagents themselves, and then later the client comes back to cancel her services and she complains that the reagents are expensive—the ones she specifically did not buy.
I wanted to die of secondhand embarrassment when this happened:
> MMC: “Hello. You puked on my shoes.”
> FMC: “I didn’t mean to. I’m really sorry.”
> MMC: “I found it amusing.” [introduces himself, asks where she works, she sidesteps the question]
> FMC: “I really didn’t mean to vomit on your shoes.”
> MMC: “Honestly, it’s what made me notice you. I’m glad it happened.”
WTF you guys? That’s not a meet cute, that’s a nightmare. Like a stress dream you have when you’re getting back into the dating scene after a long while. He hits her with scintillating conversational lines like “So, you like to crochet?” “What’s your name?” and “So, the morgue?” To which she replies with vapid staring and blinking at him. No, seriously, she didn’t actually answer any of those questions.
The book then weirdly transitions into a confusing sequence of fever dream hallucinations, lockdowns, snowstorms, sinkholes and ex-friends and exes taunting her instead of just, y’know, getting a life, and that’s when I realized I should’ve DNFed at 20% like I wanted to.
The FMC does a whole lot of weird stuff that is absolutely not in the job description of a hospital morgue… whatever she is. Like investigating stolen bodies, cremating people, and digging graves.
Finally, her parents trap her in a super-avoidable confrontation that she was warned not to attend, painfully stripping her of her goddess-given powers while everyone who cares about her is either oblivious or supernaturally prevented from offering assistance. And then the book just ends. Yay.