Whitney Atkinson's Reviews > Rhapsodic

I picked this book up because I saw a lot of people on Twitter talking about it, and I generally enjoy books that the twitter community likes, especially the hidden gems. This book is another fae book, and idk if people consider it an insult to compare it to ACOMAF, but the two are pretty similar.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I'm not mad that I read it. However, it's just not great. The storyline is solid and I feel like there was so much potential if this were written by a different person or if more was done to flesh out the storyline. I get why people ship Descallie, and I really really really wanted to fall in love with them, but although I could appreciate their characters, nothing really grabbed me and made me adore them like I do my other favorites. I feel like they were held a little bit too at arms' length, and the angst in this book had slightly too much dramatic irony to keep my interest suspended (ie. I was able to detect from page one that there was a connection between the characters but callie constantly ignored it and was like "omggg he'll never love me" even though he clearly loved her).

I like the urban fantasy-ness of this and the fae world, but it needed a lot more fleshing out. I'm not a fan of info dumps, but I was just craving some type of information about the world other than "there's four courts and one of them is called night court, imagine that!" At one point the characters portal to Venice and there's only two sentences of description, and both were pretty generic. This book just lacked unique description that put me in the world, so again, I appreciated it for the storyline, but nothing grabbed me and immersed me in the story.

I think it was largely due to the fact that this isn't my favorite writing style, so I get how others might have liked it more than me. This reminds me a little bit of Jennifer L. Armentrout's writing where she uses expressions like "Oh sweet baby Jesus!" and I'm just not a fan of that--especially in fantasy books where I prefer the mood to be darker and more serious--so it just took me out of the story every time the inner monologue would turn sarcastic. Additionally, a lot of the descriptions were weak and some of the dialogue became a bit cookie cutter. There were parts that made me grin with the cheekiness, but overall I wish there were a lot more showing of descriptions rather than the telling of details through inner monologue.

I started book two just because the end of this one sets up for an interesting sequel, and not gonna lie, those sex scenes got me wanting more. I doubt this author's books will ever be 5-stars better-than-ACOMAF level reads, but if you want something similar and you're down for a lighthearted book with fun tropes and a healthy(ish. idk, a few parts were weird but overall can't complain) romance, then I say go for it!