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Oh no. There’s dual narration in this. One of the things I loved about the first book was the single POV.

I was skimming through reviews to see if people were as confused as me with Thraga’s reaction to the midpoint reveal, and I realized something: 99% of the reviews of this book (that’s been out for over a month) are ARC reviews. It makes me question the gushing recommendations I saw on Reddit. Too many five stars, and not enough lower reviews, is suspicious.

Only 10% in so far, but I am loving this book. It’s like it was written for me. I don’t want to get my hopes up though; I’ve been burned by high expectations too much recently.

I can tell this is not for me and I am devastated. The romantic relationship will annoy me throughout the whole book; they read as siblings to me. I wish I could gift my ebook to someone else.

I am throwing in the towel.

Amateur writing, but the base ideas are good. The execution just isn’t there. To make matters worse, the female narrator’s male voices are insane sounding. Like, truly mental they would leave it like this. Beyond parody.

Immediately started listening to the audio when my library loan came in. Got to a point where a paper started flying up and attacking her and thought: is this Harry Potter?? Reader, it is.

You may have known that, because you’re smarter than me, and you’d be smart to avoid anything even tangentially related to that bigoted TERF. Hard pass.

Instant DNF.

This book is objectively terrible but also extremely addictive. I can’t explain it.

Not sure how I feel about this but the audio narration is decent.

I think this is too young for me.

This change in circumstances and main goal should have happened much earlier.

This author thinks you wear a thong OVER a bodysuit. No joke. Do women actually do this? I'm so confused.

I’m loving this so far.

I need to remember that Teddy Hamilton has an extremely nasally voice. It’s so pronounced that even at 4x speed it still annoys me. He’s ruining what would otherwise be great prose.

I’m loving the tone of this.

This is excellent so far, but it’s also very similar to The Nordic King. Like, uncomfortably so. I’m not suggesting anything close to plagiarism, though. It’s just that I can make a one to one comparison of the various beats or scenes.

I thought there’d be more story and plot to this since there are a ton of characters, but, sadly, no. And this (noncon) sex scene is just gross. Not because its noncon (I know the genre I’m reading) but because it’s disgusting. Like, gag inducing.

I can’t believe it took me this long to realize, but this is based on the Golden State Killer. Like, the male MAIN CHARACTER is the GSK.

I can’t get over this. Now two people don’t realize that if she has a phone she can Uber still? How. You don’t pay for Uber with cash.

Who doesn’t know how Uber works? And why would it matter if her wallet was stolen when she has her phone?

I’m…real fucking disturbed for reading this. But I feel like I have to add that that’s not how abortion works. You don’t abort babies. So—I have to stress this is messed up—she wouldn’t be doing THAT at abortion clinics.

This had an interesting start, but it’s so boring now.

This isn’t as gritty as I’d like (besides the smell).

This new information doesn’t make any sense. We’re supposed to believe he lives there after he was accused of this crime? What.

It feels like, I don’t know, the author doesn’t respect the intellect of her readers? It’s all very simplistic. But there’s nothing egregiously bad about it. And it’s at least an easy listen for when you’re doing other things.

There’s a pretty big inconsistency here in that Sophie would already know that this very person didn’t push her because she was looking at him when she was pushed!

This book is… fine. But Sophie is a doormat who is only made interesting through Crusie’s writing skills. I’m not even sure why Phin likes her? What’s compelling here?

Lots of alliteration in this book.