#and romantasy which has the emotion i want bUT GOES ABOUT IT IN A WAY I CANT RELATE

[wolfreader]

february 2025 wrap-up - adult fiction

this month i read thirteen (13) adult novels.

emily wilde's map of the otherlands by heather fawcett 📚 🌟🌟🌟🌟

continuing this series very quickly! and i've already placed a hold on the recently released final book at my library, so i'll likely be reading that next month.

being both romantasy and a low-fantasy setting, this is a little outside of what i normally read, but i'm really enjoying it. i think emily and wendell are really cute and i love their love <3. that being said you can tell that this is the second book in a trilogy. there were certainly developments unique to this book, but it felt very much like it was getting the characters in a place to be ready for the third book, far more than the first book felt like set-up for the second.

however, what is being set up really intrigues me, especially since the final book is supposed to take place in faerie, at least more so than the other two have. very excited!

the murderbot diaries vol. 2 by martha wells 📖 🌟🌟🌟🌟

finally picked up the next two novellas in the series. i'm really enjoying myself, it's insane that it took so long for me to pick up this series again, but at lesat i'm back on it now!

i really like seeing murderbot's emotional development over the series. it obviously doesn't have the healthiest mindset at the beginning of the series, and over these first four novellas i've enjoyed seeing it learn and grow and really come into its own. i also like that murderbot becoming healthier, mental health wise, has no connecting to it becoming more human. i really how clear the series is that murderbot is not human, will never be human, and most importantly does not want to be human or even to be percieved as human. and that's not a flaw or something to change or anything like that. a decent chunk of similar stories to this have emphasized the non-human characters personhood by essentially being "they're basically exactly like a human!" and in contrast it's really interesting to see the murderbot diaries go "murderbot is not a human and never will be, and you should not expect it to be, but its still a person and it deserves all of the priveleges of personhood that humans are granted".

and i think murderbot itself was to some extent operating under a mindset of "to be a person i have to become like a human", and since humanity was not something it wanted it was avoiding acknowledging that it was a person; but now as the series goes on its developing a far healthier and kinder viewpoint of itself and its personhood and its emotions, et cetera.

glad it's finally reunited with the preservation crew :-) best friends.

prince of thorns by mark lawrence 📖 🌟

i'm sorry you can't be misogynistic AND boring. i'm still debating over whether or not i'm going to continue peter v. brett's demon cycle because, despite the awful writing of every single woman in the series, the overall plot and especially the main male character are incredibly interesting and i want to know how it ends, so i can drag my way through the rest of the series. but prince of thorns is not only full off the edgy-for-the-sake-of-being-edgy rape and general misogyny to be expected from horrible dudebro fantasy, it's also fucking boring! 😭 if you're going to expect me to read through your miserable depiction of women at least give me an interesting story to get out of it.

it took until around the ~150 page mark for anything to happen, which might not seem like a lot until i tell you that this book is only ~300 pages. that's half the book! and what little plot there is i simply don't care about because of how awful the protagonist is. other than "is a child", jorg has zero (0) redeemable traits. to take it back to the demon cycle, jardir is a horrible fucking person. easily as bad as jorg, if not worse. but he's an interesting character and therefore his pov chapters are compelling to read. rojer, also from the demon cycle, is kinda boring but he's a charming young man with a good heart so i care what happens to him.

prince of thorns's jorg is both despicable and boring. i'm sorry girl pick a struggle! because i hate jorg as a person and a character i simply can't get invested in his story. like, i could not care less if he lives or dies, i'm certainly not going to care if he succeeds in his quest for revenge.

a lady for a duke by alexis hall 📚 🌟🌟🌟🌟

gave alexis hall another chance after i fucking hated mortal follies. and i'm glad i did because i thoroughly enjoyed this! in fact i read this over the course of a single 12 hour timespan because i was just too hooked to put it down.

despite both being queer regency romances by the same author, a lady for a duke had nothing of what i hated from mortal follies. no insufferable self-aware omniscient narrator, no poorly executed magical realism, no horribly paternalistic and condescending love interest who acts like they know the main character's feelings better than they do, et cetera. i also felt it balanced the historical believability vs the revisionist wish fulfillment far better than mortal follies. the actions and words of the characters of mortal follies felt so anachronistic that it felt pointless to make it a period piece in the first place. but in a lady for a duke, while it is obviously not 100% historically accurate and i don't expected it to be, it felt far more believable as a period piece than mortal follies.

i'm not transfem so i'm not exactly the authority on the subject but i thought the depiction of viola as a trans woman and the way her gender was discussed (both in internal narration and in dialogue) was really good. i really felt for her at got a little choked up at multiple points. and i adored the relationship between her and gracewood; they were just so cute and fit together so well.

i like that gracewood finding out that viola was his old childhood friend that he thought was dead wasn't dragged out, and is instead resolved very early in the novel. i can see an alternate version of this where his finding out that viola is trans is the third-act conflict and that would feel very... gross? idk i feel like that would play into transmisogynistic tropes about straight men being "tricked" by trans women. so thankfully it didn't do that! and i also like that it makes very clear that viola not telling him that she was trans isn't a betrayal or a lie or anything like that - gracewood feels betrayed at first, but he's the one who comes to his senses and apologizes for that.

anyway overall quite good! i can add it to the very small roster of "romance novels i actually enjoyed".

the night ends with fire by k. x. song 📚 🌟🌟🌟🌟

this is absolutely not a romantasy and i have no clue why the publisher has labeled it as one. it has about as much of a romantic subplot as like. mistborn. or maybe even the fucking witcher.

but i thoroughly enjoyed it. k. x. song's writing style is intensely readable without feeling dumbed down or juvenile, and combined with the short chapter length it made it easy to just fly through this and finish in a single day. and i was invested from only a couple of chapters in.

i really liked meilin's internal struggle. i actually recommend this one so i don't want to get too deep into it and spoil things, but she struggles with not wanting to become like her parents (for different reasons) but at the end of the novel when she looks back on her actions she realizes that she's been acting exactly like them. and her conflict over her own morality and how much she even cares about that - does she actually care about doing the right thing or does she just care about other people thinking she's doing the right thing, et cetera - was really interesting, especially as the spirit magic slowly corrupts her.

will definitely pick up the sequel when my library gets it in.

faebound by saara el-arifi 📚 🌟🌟🌟🌟

once again i have no idea why publishers market this as a romantasy, though it's more understandable as a romantasy than the night ends with fire.

i've said it before but i love when messy dyke drama is represented in books outside of lesbian litfic. yeeran and furi are soooo messy but in a fun way not a way that makes you want to them to break up. i felt like the development of their relationship was very natural; despite the bad blood between them, the forced proximity and the already heightened emotions naturally lends itself to passion. and the other romantic subplot, between lettle and rayan, was also compelling, though they were more "cute and sweet (but also tragic)" as opposed to yeeran and []'s "messy and passionate (and also tragic)".

i did not see any of the major twists coming, but looking back i can see that the clues were there from the beginning, which is the mark of a good twist! definitely ended in an intriguing place, and i'm excited to pick up cursebound soon. my library already has it in their collection, it's just chekced out right now, so i just have to place a hold.

2001: a space odyssey by arthur c. clarke 📖 🌟🌟🌟

no clue what this guy was on about. i enjoyed arthur c. clarke's prose, it's simple without feeling dumbed down, but once we got past the part with bowman and hal and the discovery and started getting into the more high-concept stuff at the end i literally had to look up a summary to understand what was happened 😭 unsure if the issue here is my lack of familiarity with litfic or my lack of familiarity with science fiction, because both of them apply to this book.

shorefall by robert jackson bennett 📖 🌟🌟🌟🌟

excited to be continuing this series! i really loved it. there's not a lot i can say because all of the things i really loved are heavily dependant on you having read the first book, and i don't want to spoil anything because this is (thus far) a series i really recommend, but in a general sense i really like the turns this took. there was one major twist that i almost guessed, i was just a little off, and that was exciting to read.

really like the development of our main characters' relationships to each other. while they certainly became friends in the first book, it was heavily based on surviving something traumatic together and being bonded by that experience. now, with shorefall taking place years after foundryside, you definitely get a sense of how close they've become and how comfortable they are in each other's presence. and especially with some things that happen in shorefall, they are certainly a lot closer, and bonded on a far deeper level, than they were at the end of foundryside.

was very worried that my favorite character wasn't going to make an appearance because we were about halfway through and he hadn't shown up, but he did appear shortly after that :-).

midnight in everwood by m.a. kuzniar 📚 🌟🌟

this was on my "25 books to read in 2025" and i was convinced i was going to have to buy it because it's only published in the uk, but i went to the library with a friend the other day and wouldn't you know this was right there on the new book display!

that being said... this is so aggressively average. every character is incredibly one-dimensional, just bundles of tropes with names, and even when i can tell that kuzniar is trying to give them more depth, it's just not landing. the setting is very poorly realized; the characters could be standing in a blank void for all i knew. the entire experience of reading this was the exact opposite of being immersed in a story.

additionally, so much of the plot relies on marietta being ignorant and naive to the point that it's infuriating. her getting captured, and therefore kicking off the majority of the novel, is entirely the result of her own stupidity. and i'm supposed to believe that she's reading to move out and support herself?

water moon by samantha sotto yamabao 📚 🌟🌟🌟🌟

the reviews were right to call this a studio ghibli film in novel form - it strikes that same perfect balance where it's full of fairy-tale-esque worldbuiling and whimsy but it's also not afraid to get serious and emotional when it needs to.

i really loved the atmosphere of this book. the other world that hana and her family are from felt very dreamlike and intangible but not in a "this is a very poorly fleshed out setting" way, in an intentional way. it's also somewhat interestingly written; it starts out almost litfic in execution but settles into a more expected fantasy style by the end.

i loved both hana and keishin individually as characters and i loved their relationship. despite only knowing each other for a few days, the progression of their feelings for each other still managed to feel natural. given who they are as people, the places they are in their lives, and the exact circumstances under which they meet, it makes perfect sense that they'd connect as deeply as they do as quickly as they do.

x-men: the legacy quest book three by steve lyons 📖 🌟🌟🌟

somewhat of a mediocre end to the trilogy. not as bad as book two, but certainly not as strong as book one was.

book three had a really strong middle that i flew right through, but a really slow and boring beginning and end. it took me a while to get invested in the story (which is why this ~300 page mass market paperback took me a couple of months to finish lmao) and then after i got past that rising action and into the climax i slowed down again.

also had some incredibly clumsy metaphors for real-world oppression but i mean. it's x-men lmao.

network effect by martha wells 📖 🌟🌟🌟🌟

finished the first and (thus far) only full novel in the series! and i really enjoyed it, and i'm really looking forward to completely catching up with the series next month.

this far into a series it's difficult to really talk about what i enjoyed about network effect without repeating what i enjoyed about vol. 2 earlier this month, so sorry for being vague but i just love the development of murderbot's friendships and its slow but sure healing from a lifetime of abuse. i want that funny little death robot to be happy and healthy so badly and we're slowly inching our way there.

sister snake by amanda lee koe 📚 🌟🌟🌟

complicated feelings on this one. i really enjoyed the majority of it, but there was this one plot point where the moment it was introduced i was like. it already hurts my enjoyment that this happens at all and how this ends up playing out could cook the entire book. and. i think it did? like, this was going to be a four star and the way this one thing played out brought it to a solid right down the middle 2.5 that i'm rounding up to a three.

spoilers i guess if you don't want them: su straight up murders emerald's best (and i think only?) friend, and when emerald finds out about this su isn't really sorry and doesn't really apologize, and then at the very end of the novel su is severely injured and emerald ends up spending an indeterminate period of her life nursing her sister back to health. and that just didn't really sit right with me? especially after most of the post-taking human form interactions we learn about between the snake sisters involve su being really shitty to emerald, and then this on top of that... despite what the final paragraph wants me to believe, i didn't see this as a powerful example of the deep bonds of sisterhood and the love these women had for each other, i saw it as a deeply depressing example of a queer woman dedicating her life to caring for a shitty conservative relative out of obligation and loneliness.

aside from that i think a lot of the characters felt a little based in stereotypes, especially the friend who dies and the friends emerald briefly makes in singapore. wish i liked it better because the prose itself was so strong.

[blurrypetals]

The War of Two Queens by Jennifer L. Armentrout - blurrypetals review

originally posted jan. 11, 2025 - ★☆☆☆☆

This is gonna have to be a big old "oof" from me, dawg. My god this book was rough. Armentrout is clearly spreading a tablespoon of butter across an entire loaf of bread here and I found myself nothing but bored and frustrated for its entire runtime.

It's the longest book in the series to date, not counting the Flesh and Fire books, but now more than any other book I've read before, this book would have been twice as good if it had been half as long, but even then, it still would only have been 3 or 4 stars, it still wouldn't have been as good as the earlier books in the series.

I think the part that bogged me down the most was the writing. Now, Armentrout has never been the most talented wordsmith. I've been reading her books for a long time and, beyond a couple of outliers, she's never been able to stumble her way into what I would call "great writing." That said, she has written many books I enjoyed a lot, never because of her subpar craft, but rather in spite of it. I've always compared her writing to the literary equivalent of a bag of Doritos: they have no nutritional value and you shouldn't live off them, but they're fun and good for a dopamine hit.

While this was true of the first two Blood and Ash books, I do remember finding them a lot more mature than her previous works and finding that she'd grown as a writer since writing The Dark Elements and the Lux series. I didn't love The Crown of Gilded Bone, which is why I took a years-long break from the series, but its writing at least felt on par with the other two books, even if it was boring and slow compared to A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire, which I'd consider to be Armentrout's best book (that I've read, at least).

With this book, however, it feels like Armentrout backslid to where she'd started all over again. Any semblance of careful plotting feels like it went out the window along with any willpower to build good romantic tension or ability to have any decent exposition or prose. Not only was the writing poor, but the editing was abysmal. It feels like Poppy had no personality beyond "grr stabby stabby", wanting to fuck Casteel and Kieran all the time, feeling ether, and tasting others' emotions. She repeats those characteristics over and over again and, on top of that, it's poor writing. I lost count of how many times I rolled my eyes over the way she described sensing everyone's emotions; it was so goddamn groan-worthy and disgustingly overabundant. I don't need to hear about the nutty taste of resolve every other conversation. This is the reason this book is too damn long and it absolutely should have been edited down or, even better, cut out completely.

I remember a time where I enjoyed Poppy as a main character, how she had a lot more depth and character to her than Armentrout's other heroines, but I don't know what happened to that Poppy. She certainly didn't grow to this point. Instead, she seems far more like a caricature of other badass romantasy heroines, copying others' homework without understanding why it works with those characters instead of using the building blocks to make Poppy her own character, the way she was in the first two books. Again, this is not growth, this is personality transplant.

This is also the first book where we get Casteel's POV and this would normally have been pretty interesting and exciting, but it only served to be a boring way to further inflate this book's already horrendously bloated word count. Apparently the next book, A Soul of Ash and Blood is 100% from his POV and I can't say I'm terribly excited for that prospect after what we got in this book, and that goes for more than just the chapters from his perspective.

I also felt like his arc was so underserved here. He went through so much in this book due to his recapture, but it feels like he recovers from his experience so easily and quickly. It really feels like Poppy fucks him a couple of times and everything is all hunky dory again. Why not have their sex life affected by this in some way? Why not have their relationship affected at all because of this? What was the point of his recapture if it doesn't impact him as a character at the end of the day? Just for the cliffhanger at the end of The Crown of Gilded Bone? It's so ridiculous, a total waste of everyone's time.

And speaking of the boys, just to briefly touch on this, I am really disappointed with how lackluster and forced the romance with Kieran is. Now, I love a good throuple. Polyamory is a great way to add a little romantic tension for a romance series that has gone on this long, but it sincerely feels to me like Armentrout was scrambling for romantic tension after fumbling getting any tension from Cas's recapture and subsequent rescue and so she needed to sloppily toss in some scenes of Poppy and Kieran flirting for what must be the first time in the entire series (though I can't confirm that since it's been 4+ years since I read the other books) in order to add...something?

In the end, however, Armentrout sums up this plot point perfectly herself: she states everything and nothing has changed in their relationship. Truly, nothing really changes between them all and the love scene between them was so boring I actually fell asleep while listening to it.

I really am so disappointed in this book. I really enjoyed the first two books and, while the third wasn't my favorite, it was nowhere near as terrible as this book was. I enjoyed them so much, already have the rest of the Flesh and Fire books and A Soul of Ash and Blood on Audible, but I'm definitely going to need a break if I'm going to continue getting caught up on these. This was a truly difficult book to get through and my poor husband had to hear me complain about this book a whole lot in the 5 days it took me to read it.

The craft is poor, the characters are completely different from the ones I was used to seeing in previous installments, it's overstuffed, far too long for its own good, and it simply did not work. I took a massive break between books 3 and 4 but I feel even less excited to continue this story than ever before. I felt like this not only was unexciting and disheartening as an installment in the Blood and Ash series, it also felt like it spoiled plot points of the Flesh and Fire books, which I not only have not finished, but also were not all out when this book came out.

Cannot recommend. Maybe one day I'll come back, but that won't be too soon.

[thexgrayxlady]

What I Read in January 2024

The Mask of Mirrors by M. A. Carrick - 3.5/5.00

Holy Rooks Batman! All my cards on the table, Locke Lamora ruined fantasy heists/con artists for me forever, and this book is following up one of my favorite books of last year.

This book is too damn long. It does not need to be 630 pages long. I don't mind a slow paced book, but this one is unfocused with too many unnecessary tangents and POVs. If you cut down the number of POVs, the lush world building and intricate plot and storylines could be maintained, without the bloat. That being said, you can tell that this comes from a place of ambition and love. You can tell the authors have the biggest brainworms about this story and the world they've created and they want to share it with the reader so badly and I love that for them. There is a glossary and a dramatis personae , but most of the time I feel like things were introduced with enough context that I could figure it out. I did refer to the dramatis personae for some of the minor characters with very similar names though.

It has a glacial start, but that lets the reader luxuriate in the world. Some of the magic is introduced here, but it feels very mundane in a good way. Then the genre does a hard shift at the half way point from a heist to more of a fantasy, but it takes a lot of things from the heist plot and interweaves them with the fantasy in a way that I love. The magic that was once just another fact of life in this world feels fantastic and big in a way it didn't before, but it builds that upon the strong backbone of what was established earlier. Once that shift occurs, things move a lot faster, but it's still plagued with unnecessary POVs, which cost the book whatever inertia it's built up.

The characters are interesting and enjoyable. Vargo is such an asshole and I love him. I love reading Ren's POV and watching her switch between her different personas. When she's being Arenza, it feels very different from when she's Renata. I just wish that she had been a little more morally gray. She's a con artist. She's explicitly back in the city to swindle her way onto a family's social register and steal a fuckload of money. Let her do more bad things. That being said, Sedge does not add enough to justify his inclusion in the present day. We don't get to see his reunion with Tess or feel any emotional impact from his reunion with Ren. He should have stayed the dead brother in the sad backstory.

Unfortunately, the other half of the Rook and Rose duo also leaves a lot to be desired. The Rook's mystique is ruined too early on by the scene in Mettore's study. In one scene, he goes from a mysterious Batman or Zorro figure to a generic snarky brooding guy. If they had never spoken until he pulls her out of the dream, that scene would have been stronger. The reveal about his identity doesn't quite work either because you get that character's POV too often for it to feel like a cool reveal, it's just feels cheap. He's also one of the POVs that I would have removed anyway because he's kind of insufferable and annoying. You could excise the Rook from the story and not much would change. The next book in the series needs to do a lot of work to prove that one of the titular characters needs to be there.

Despite how much this book has working against it, I liked it. I want to read the next one. It has fantastic world building and respects the reader's intelligence. The characters are really enjoyable and well defined. It just has a lot of frustrating bits and needed a stronger editor to tell the authors no.

Dragonfall by L.R. Lam - 3.25/5.00

I didn't realize when I started this that it was as romance focused as it was. That being said, I enjoyed it a lot more than a lot of other romantasy I've read. This is in part due to the fact that the author actually understands what enemies to lovers means.

The characters are all interesting, but some POVs are not needed and I wish the author had stuck to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person. I really enjoyed Arcady and Everen bickering. I think that more books relationships should start with holding a knife to someone's throat. I like that the book ends before the relationship can really get started. And the hair dye scene is so. Good.

The beginning is a little rough and I had to reread some sections a few times to really understand what was going on, but after that it was fast and easy to read. I may have appreciated a glossary or some appendices, but by the halfway point, I figured out the parts of the magic system and culture that weren't being explained in the text. I honestly liked this because it shows that the author respected their readers' intelligence enough to trust that they can figure it out. For example, there's something weird going on with capitalizing some, but not all, pronouns that isn't explained until ~1/3 of the way through. There is enough in context to figure out the rules, but I could see how it could annoy readers.

Feathered dragons are always cool.

The Defiant Heir by Melissa Caruso - 4.25/5.00

Swords and Fire is a very underrated series. I read the first book a few years ago and I'm surprised about how much of it remembered after the first few chapters refreshed me. It gets extra points because the author is a ZooMass graduate.

After several books in a row where I felt like there were far too many POVs, sticking to one POV was so refreshing. Amalia is interesting to follow and I enjoyed getting to see her growing into her own political prowess and the deepening bond between her and Zaira. By the end of the book, she's become someone who can make a difficult choice for the greater good. The ending leaves no easy way out. There's nobody she can convince and no opponent that Zaira can burn away. All she can do is direct the fallout from Ruvan's machinations to where it can do the least harm, even if it hurts people she loves.

The other characters are also fantastic. I loved reading Zaira's growing relationship with Terika. Marcello remains a steadfast and steady presence. Istrella's ingenuity and eccentricity shines on the page like the artifice devices she creates.

And then there's Kathe. He's an asshole and I love him so much. There's a scene at the end that I went feral over, even if in it he's displaying some top tier dickery. Actually, I liked it more because he was displaying some top tier dickery. I love when characters who are supposed to be morally gray tricksters actually do shitty things.

I was surprised by how much I didn't hate the love triangle and actually kind of liked it. You understand how much Amalia cares for Marcello, but you also understand and appreciate how much she would be giving up if she didn't pursue a political match. And Amalia knows this too and it hurts so good. And you understand why she's entertaining Kathe's courtship, initially in order to make an important ally in Vaskandar, then as she develops genuine feelings for him, even if he is a shady bastard. And part of this is just because how secondary the romance is to the plot. Like yes, this is going on in the background, but Amalia's got to stop the Witch Lords from going to war and pass her reform acts.

This series is such an underrated gem.

Catalyst Gate by Megan E. O'Keefe - 3.75/5.00

I was so excited to read this and I had such a blast with it. While there are some fumbles, the author mostly sticks the landing and The Protectorate might be one of my new favorite sci-fi series.

The pacing is more varied than in Chaos Vector. It still takes you by the hand and says, "Let's fucking go!" but now, it also takes the time to slow down and let some things really sink in and build tension. Some sections, like one of Ranier's bases, feel rushed and in some ways, it feels like it should have been split into two books in order to keep up the fast pace, but not hurry through set pieces.

I really liked going to Earth and finding out what actually happened to it. It was one of the strongest sections of the book and it's horrifying. We've known for the whole series that the Earth was destroyed, but it feels like standard sci-fi set dressing. Earth was destroyed in a natural disaster, humanity took to the stars. No. What happened is horrifying and well foreshadowed and I loved it. The last book had a reveal that made me go feral. This one was chilled me.

The characters are still strong and interesting, if not particularly complex. Biran really stole the show this time around. He grows into his role as Director of Ada and you see him come into his own politicking and deceiving and having to put on a good front the face of horrifying trauma. His relationship with Vladsen is really great. In the amount of time that we got with them, I enjoyed reading how his crew comes together and the tension that still exists between them. It took me three books to really get into Sanda and Tomas, but I came around. The new ship, Bel Marduk, is such a good girl, I wish we got more of her and her emerging personality, but it's a long book and she's ultimately a minor character. I also wish we got more of Echo and the person she's growing into outside of being an offshoot of Ranier and I feel like this really was a missed opportunity. Sometimes, what the characters know and how they know it, feels a little muddy and I wish you got to see them figure these things out.

While Ranier maybe doesn't deserve to be at the table with SHODAN, GLaDOS, and Durandal, she should at least be in the same room. At first, she almost doesn't feel threatening because she's a very distant antagonist, but once she moves against the protagonists, she's horrifyingly effective and efficient. Reading about the destruction of Ada is a gut punch, especially when you get to the gardens. The narrative takes the time to point out that there are cultivars that were saved from Earth and after learning about what really happened to Earth earlier in the book, it's actually really sad. The scene where Sanda's trying to negotiate with her and realizes that she can't be negotiated with because she can't want anything beyond her corrupted programming is really effective.

The ending is, unfortunately, really rushed. There's a big reveal about one of the main characters that doesn't have enough buildup for it to have the impact it should have. I wish that humanity had more of a role in defeating Ranier. That being said, I really like that when we get to the alien precursors, they might be worse than Ranier. While this series comes to a definite ending, there's enough left open that if the author wanted to come back to this universe, they could and there would be satisfying stories to come out of it.

Raiders of the Lost Heart by Jo Segura - 1.25/5.00

My disappointment is apparently measurable on a five point scale, and my day is ruined. The main character is too stupid to be likable, and the love interest is just incompetent. The author wants you to believe that these are two intelligent and hard-working archaeologists in their thirties, yet they are immature, impulsive, and unprofessional.

I really hoped I'd get two rival archaeologists falling in love over an adventure. Instead, I want to take rivals to lovers way from this author. The characters don't fight in a way that's fun. Corrie just throws tantrums and again, Ford is way too incompetent to be a believable love interest.

It is, however, very easy to read. I read most of it while too hungover to focus on the more complicated book I actually wanted to read. While it's bad, it isn't notable enough to even be mad at.