After a couple of misses with other ARCs earlier this year, I tried to temper my expectations going into this one. I needn’t have worried, though; this book is very well done, and I really enjoyed it. The characters are well-rounded and complex, and the plot is compelling and engaging. They use the tropes well, and they’re not super in your face about the fact that they’re using the tropes. The owner’s daughter, soon to be his boss angle, was interesting. It made for a solid conflict for them to overcome, especially given how poorly Linc is playing at the start of the book.



For a guy with the nickname Caveman, you’d expect that Linc might be a bit misogynistic or very controlling, and that’s not the case. He’s fiercely protective and does have some caveman-like tendencies when it comes to protecting his people and his net; that’s where the nickname comes from. The way he is always solidly in Catherine’s corner but doesn’t step on her toes to protect her is a green flag for sure.



Catherine is a very interesting character. I really liked her and the way she handled herself and the situations she found herself in. Her brother Daniel was the worst, and I know he was written to be completely unsympathetic, and they succeeded in portraying him that way. The first clue is when he sets Catherine up to be assaulted by one of his business colleagues to further a deal. Luckily, Linc happened to be around for that before it went too far, but just a warning that the show more content is there.



The supporting cast of Linc’s teammates is fantastic; I can’t wait for their books. The horrifying way that the authors write in a hockey injury towards the end to set up book 2 is a little too realistic, so if medical trauma is not your jam, be warned there’s some of that near the end of this book. I’m still gonna read it. show less

Honestly? This book is kind of a hot mess. I thought about DNFing it multiple times but I wanted to use it for some challenge prompts and gave into the sunk cost fallacy. But I wish I had DNF'd it. The story had so much potential but the writing is all over the place. Multiple scenes repeated themselves multiple times and each time they repeated there was something that contradicted the previous instance of the scene. It was confusing I never knew what was going on the timeline was impossible to follow. It also feels like we came in in the middle of a story that was already happening and none of the stuff that happened before we came in ever gets explained. Random characters with new lore come out of nowhere, and other characters completely change their characterization in the middle of the book. This one was definitely not for me which makes me sad because I loved the premise and was so hopeful for it. Big let down!

I won an ARC of this book through LibraryThing. This was the second book by Cassidy Berg that I read in January, and of the two, this one is better. It’s not a perfect book, but it has SOOOO much potential. I wanted it to be a 5-star, it was so good, up until about the 85% mark where it sort of went off the rails. There was some weird repetition of scenes that then ended up contradicting each other, and it felt like there were some scenes missing. Mild spoiler, there’s a third-act break-up here - but the reconciliation scene never actually seems to appear, the back together part kind of comes out of nowhere.


The idea behind the book and the overall plot are fantastic. You’ve got a genre-savvy FMC and the tropiest of MMCs possible, who also happens to be genre-savvy! She literally ends up living the romance novel she’s trying to write, it’s the perfect setup for a really fun and funny romcom. But it’s let down by the structure and editing. The blurb says that Liam moves in next door to Emma, but that happens the other way around. And then at various points throughout the book he actually seems to either live down the street, or across town in an apartment building. The location of the firehouse also seems to change multiple times throughout the book. Things like that sort of take you out of the immersive experience of the book.


There are some thoughtful and deep insights hidden in this story though, so even though I gave it a low structural rating on my rating show more scale, the vibe score was what brought it up to a 4-star overall. Even though there are issues, these could be fixed with more editing, the heart of the book is a really good story that I wanted to keep reading and that’s a 4-star score to me. show less

The plot of this book is giving me the first Mighty Ducks movie vibes like there is no tomorrow. Jack is what would happen if Gordon Bombay had gone pro instead of becoming a lawyer, and Amanda reminds me so much of Charlie Conway’s mom in that first film. She even had the red hair!
This is a novella, it’s quite short. So obviously it was going to be fast-paced. Personally, I think it was too fast-paced though. At 15% of the book, after only two interactions and one fight over what seemed like only one day in storytime, the should-have-been enemies were already reconsidering their opinions of one another and starting to develop feelings that they wouldn’t admit. That phrase comes up a lot actually, it was still coming up at about 85% which was a bit frustrating as a reader. There were other sentences and scenes that also came up almost word for word in multiple spots in the book which was a little distracting. There was also a weirdly aborted plotline involving the return of Amanda’s hockey player ex. He showed up for one scene, seemed like he was going to be a problem, and then just vanished.
As characters Amanda and Jack are great, and their chemistry and story make a lot of sense, especially the way the town and Amanda, and the hockey team, all change Jack for the better. The problem was because of the pacing there was way too much telling and not enough showing how all of that change came about. My biggest issue with the characters though was that Amanda gets show more completely off the hook for being the one to drive Jack away, he’s the one who ends up having to apologize. Even given these issues I had, I enjoyed the book. show less

I won an ARC of this book through LibraryThing and I was really excited about it. I received it after the release date (Oct. 11) but I wanted to get to it quickly. Overall the book was really complex and dealt with a lot of dark stuff and I did like it. My main issue with it was the pacing of the book and the fact that that led to a lot of telling without showing. Things happened too quickly and jumpily in the first quarter of the book and then during the rest, some missing scenes could have been important in the multiple time skips.



Barnes has created some truly complex characters, and I love them both. Seriously, Steve and Ethan are fantastically realistic and well-written. They’re both completely broken birds with daddy issues and a LOT of unresolved childhood trauma that causes them both a lot of problems forming adult relationships. When they’re together they do help each other most of the time and work really well together, except when their individual demons are causing them to individually self-sabotage. There’s a lot of that, that’s where the central drama in their relationship comes from.



The way the plot gets resolved is great, the issues don’t get swept under the rug. The boys get a happy ending but acknowledge that they’ve definitely both still got work to do. They choose to be messy together and help each other. This feels like the healthiest ending for these two chaos gremlins. I’ll read the others in the series that deal with hockey!

Magical libraries are my thing, I just finished Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series, and this gives me those vibes but in a contemporary setting. There are a LOT of reading and library puns running around here, in addition to Paige Turner and Dewey Decimal (pronounced Decimall) there’s also a side character mentioned whose name is Reed Moore. I’m living for it all.
The amount of bad luck that Paige runs into and the number of contrived events and run-ins do start to get to you after awhile which is the main reason I only rated it 4 stars. Learning the ins and outs of the library system and the politics of this world’s paranormal society with Paige is easy because she’s as much of a newcomer as the reader, although you sure wouldn’t know that all the time given some of her reactions to certain situations.
Because this is the first book in a series there’s a lot of world-building and plot elements that don’t get resolved here because they’re setting up longer narrative arcs, the death curse for example. But the plot of this book is cohesive and the adventure is compact, clean and well thought out. Some things do happen to quickly, it’s a very condensed time line, especially given how much travelling the MCs have to do. I’ll continue the series.

The magic system in this book is a lot of fun. You have elementals whose powers are generated internally, controlled by a specific emotion different to each individual. And then you have Witches who need to absorb fuel from an external source to power their magic. Ava is a witch and Sammy is a water elemental. I love the nicknames they give the different elementals - Sammy is a squid for example. The differences between the two types of magic become really important in this story and I like how that gets handled. Sammy never shames Ava for the fact that she needs the lust of other people to fuel her. He’s not a playboy, possibly a reformed one but I’m not sure even that’s accurate, he was more party boy than playboy from the sense I got. My favourite moment, where I knew Sammy was going to be different was when he was willing to leave his best friend’s house right after arriving because he hadn’t realised Ava was going to be there and he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. This was early on in their relationship when he’d only just accidentally found out who she was outside the club.



There’s lots of spice and some play with Sammy’s powers which I think could have definitely been explored more than they were in that regard. The way the workplace harassment storyline was handled was really well done. As someone who works in an academic library, and who has friends who work in institutions with morals clauses I can say with ease that Ava's experiences are show more more than realistic and her concerns of discovery are valid.



I definitely want to go back and read books one and two after reading this especially book two because it features a thruple. Overall, it is an entertaining paranormal romance with loveable characters. show less

This was a sweet story, and the world-building here was excellent. I love a secondary world fantasy and this book delivered all the things I expect from that sub-genre of fantasy.