ok, the writing in here was shockingly terrible and i can’t even be mad about it because i was laughing my ass off. please, this was so unserious ✋🏾😂. i need to put less faith in some of these booktok recommendations because this one is entering a hall of infamy for how bad it was. i legit started leaning into the idea that this was satire. maybe i’m the problem because so many people love this, but i was genuinely crying tears of laughter at some points. am i the issue?? maybe i am, idk. but this was monumentally ridiculous 😂
i wasn’t going to bother with a detailed review, but i can’t resist listing some of the most egregious offenses:
1) caricature characters - i’m no expert when it comes to realism but i have read enough mafia romance to know what i like and what feels good, and the mafia characters in here, including and especially the mmc, were cartoonishly dramatic and bizarre. there was absolutely no nuance. imagine a villain twiddling his moustache and making a “mu-hahahahaha” laugh? that’s about the equivalent of what was going on in here in terms of characterization. the mmc would have the most dramatic outbursts which were supposed to come off as menacing and intimidating, but i couldn’t stop laughing 😂 he was also using words like “pal” and “buddy” when talking to enemies? PLEASE ✋🏾 this was a CARTOON. and then, when it comes to the fmc, her behaviour was erratic and inconsistent. and sigh, just…utterly tired. she starts out as the typical shy girl who insists she wants nothing to do with the big scary mmc she’s a little terrified of, but goes against her nature to be bold, outspoken and defiant with him at every turn, even though she’s got limited familiarity with the him at this point and continues to be meek and mild with everyone else, as is her baseline. she insists to herself that she knows his type and would never play into his hand, yet she still folds for him almost immediately when he makes a move on her. and this little defiant streak is catnip to the mmc who likes that she’s a fighter and “not like the other girls” when everyone else treats him differently. how many times are we going to be subjected to this banal dynamic? 😂
2) the romance was awful. instalust and instant obsession to the n-th degree, with the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. there was no shade in building tension or pacing things logically and organically. before the 40% mark, the fmc already thinks she could be falling in love. if there’s something that really annoys me in the pace of any romance, it’s when there’s an overfamiliarity between the mcs after a couple days of knowing each other. it never feels natural! which was the case in here on many fronts. there were so many clichés too - and this is coming from someone who reads so much romance that i know it’s hard to be truly original and that a lot of things are recycled because of trope-based writing and there’s only so many ways to describe certain things that are commonalities in the genre and what people tend to respond to, but THIS wasn’t even that - it was so blatant in its lack of creativity. this book was also so delusional in creating something out of absolutely nothing 😂 trying to explain or come up with these seismic-level points of connection and trying to gaslight me into thinking there was chemistry between the mcs from their very first encounter, when there was NOTHING in the writing to justify this. i don’t even want to talk about the spice - i couldn’t stop cringing and everything was so corny (this last thing not even being limited to the spice, it was a problem rife throughout the book in general). the only saving grace on the smut front was that at least the book waited to start with it and there’s only like 2 scenes, unlike some other bad mafia romances where it starts early and continues in earnest throughout the book. i would quote some of the horrendous lines but i don’t have it in me right now.
3) the prose was riddled with repetitive words and phrases close together. i’m not sure if this was a translation thing (because i did learn while reading this, that the original language for this book is not english and it’s translated fiction) - so it could be a matter of a bad translation and a lack of synonyms used by the translator. maybe it reads differently in the original language. but there were really strange choices made in the writing based off of my experience with the english version. basic editing cues were missed. like someone writing “x person, the head of the irish mafia….” and then not even two sentences later, the prose would read “the head of the irish mafia, x person”. or how many times was i going to have to read about “the beast” or the “demon” inside of the mmc when he’s referring to himself, which was being mentioned so many times and close together in the prose - like hello? where was the editor??? lmao. these seem like petty examples but this issue materialized in so many different places across the book. it’s usually a consequence of lazy and uncreative writing, and/or poor editing - but again, this could be a translation thing, i really don’t know.
4) while on the topic of writing style, the overuse of exclamation marks in here really added to the hilarity of things. it made some of the outbursts and declarations, or even simple commentary and responses in the dialogue feel overly dramatic and yes, cartoonishly comical. i literally couldn’t take anything seriously when it was being scrumpt.
5) the transitions between scenes (and even within scenes) were so clunky and abrupt - i’m genuinely shook at how this was all put together so clumsily. the flow was so jerky.
6) lazy world-building - there was absolutely no atmosphere whatsoever. a lot of this was written so perfunctorily. there was no vibe
7) outlandish metaphors. like seriously, some of them made absolutely no sense. the first one that took me out early on in the book was about some guy who was described as “having enough gel in his hair to drown a small animal”…i was like huh? why was this a choice 😭 and this madness continued! there’s another one sticking out in my memory about “one kiss feeling like starvation” - what does this even mean?? 😭😂 HELP
8) the fmc breaking the fourth wall repeatedly…annoys me to no end.
i really could go on, but i don’t have the energy…and this is probably not healthy for me to keep ruminating like this.
i don’t know why i didn’t dnf this because i picked up on the tomfoolery about 5% in, but like a clown, i trusted the many 4-5 star ratings on this app and the reviews (also from booktok creators i know have given some reasonable recs in the past). people were saying this is amazing, that it was a mafia romance with a great plot (which isn’t always a given with the subgenre - sometimes the plots leave things to be desired and you’re left with a very corny and unoriginal romance as the foundation of the book or it’s a smut-overload with not much else in the way of a story) - so i had high hopes for this based on the feedback that i was seeing and i continued to hope for the best even though i had a perplexing time from the near beginning. for a little while there, i genuinely thought things would get better but at around the 20% mark, it crystallized for me that it wouldn’t but i couldn’t stop subjecting myself to this either.
the premise was somewhat unique with the medical bracelets and whatnot - it wasn’t another arranged / forced marriage or captivity or stalker romance (well, there was a stalker but it wasn’t the mmc), so there was promise for something different as far as mafia romance goes and i can kinda see what people may have liked about the bones of the plot, but the execution was atrocious and it ended up devolving into the same recycled plotlines anyways, nullifying the hint of originality with the stem stuff. i will give some credit for the telenovela-esque plot twist in the second half - i didn’t see it coming and it was quite an entertaining reveal, albeit very melodramatic and straight of out of a soap opera.
like i said, i can’t even find it in myself to be upset though, because i did get a good laugh out of this, just not in a way the author intended, i don’t think 😂 if the question of whether i’m continuing with the series when the translation for the julia / maxim book or any other subsequent books / translations come out isn’t obvious, the answer is a resounding NO. future me really needs to remember this and come back to this review if i have a bout of amnesia when new things pop up, trying to lure me back into this insanity.