Xan’s Reviews > Into the Mystic, Volume Two > Status Update

I liked Lighthouse 5. It's a lovely lighthouse operator/mermaid romance.

Holy Water is an intense, compelling, and rather tragic love story about a girl who falls in love with la llorona.

To the Sea is not a classic romance with a happy ending. It's a rather bleak story, with a romantic relationship interwoven, one that brings solace and hope in a terrible situation. It was sad to read.

I deeply disliked Vampire Hours. It was coercion dressed up as romance, with an MC whose depression gets cured in a vague handwavy minute, just by going to therapy.

The Holy Company is a ghost story/friends to lovers romance with a demisexual MC. I liked it.

I loved Unraveled. The magic parts were totally my cup of tea, the romance was sweet, I loved the chosen family. I would love to read a whole novel of this.

I enjoyed Dressed In Wolf Skin. A lovely witch/werewolf romance, full of heat, tension and complexity, while one MC is in danger.

Seaside Escape did not work for me as a story. It felt like it handwaved away generations of trafficking as if they were no big deal & resolved these huge complex realities in a very simplified way.

Seaside Escape has a sea witch MC whose family has enslaved women selkies and sold them to men for generations. This story is abt her realizing that this is wrong cuz she falls for a selkie she enslaved.

Already feeling wary about Seaside Escape and I am just starting to read it. The fat antagonism is pretty intense. And the MC is basically doing a magical version of trafficking.