My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Romance, Fantasy, Paranormal
Content: Strong Language, One descriptive sex scene, One make out scene
If there’s something Ravenna Chastain knows,
it’s when to end things. And after she almost winds up the victim of a
cult that believes she’s a witch, it’s easy to walk away from her
dead-end career, ready for a new start. But where to find a job that
would allow her to use her very specialized skill set? The answer is
clear: she becomes a matchmaker.
But even a successful
matchmaker can’t find someone for everyone, and Ravenna considers Ethan
Sweetwater her first professional failure. After nine failed dates,
Ravenna knows it’s time to cut Ethan loose. But Ethan refuses to be
fired as a client—he needs one final date to a business function. Since
Ravenna needs a date herself to a family event, they agree to a deal:
she will be his (business) date if he will be her (fake) date to her
grandparents’ anniversary celebration.
What Ethan fails to
mention is that attending the business function is a cover for some
industrial espionage that he’s doing as a favor to the new Illusion Town
Guild boss. Ravenna is happy to help, but their relationship gets even
more complicated when things heat up—the chemistry between them is
explosive, as explosive as the danger that’s stalking Ravenna. Lucky for
her, Ethan isn’t just an engineer—he’s also a Sweetwater, and
Sweetwaters are known for hunting down monsters…
I got this book from NetGalley and it's the first time I've read anything by this author. I thought I was going to get something along the lines of a paranormal rom-com, and parts of it felt that way, but unfortunately, this wasn't exactly what I was expecting. For one thing, this is set on another planet with a very thin backstory on how that all came about. This is number fifteen of a companion series, and maybe there was better world building in the earlier books. I don't know, but otherwise this works fine as a standalone romance.
The brief backstory in the book is that, somehow a portal, that they refer to as the curtain, mysteriously appeared one day and people went through it and began to colonize this other planet. Then one day just as mysteriously as it appeared, it closed again leaving everyone on that planet unable to ever get back to Earth. Um ok...I realize this is a romance novel and wasn't expecting anything deep, but I've read fantasy and space romances with way better world building. It just didn't work for me. I think I would have liked this much better if it had been set in our world here on Earth, which is what I was expecting.
After initially not caring for the start of this book, I did warm to the story a bit after I got to the matchmaking agency part. I could get behind the romance between Ravenna and Ethan and I liked both of their characters. It was fun waiting for them to realize they should be together. That being said, the story was very predictable, which I'm ok with most of the time with romances. This time, I just didn't enjoy the story enough for it not to matter. If there had been more humor, it might would have worked for me, but I think this took itself a little too seriously. I just didn't care about the parts with the villain or the villain's motivations. It felt underdeveloped like the world building.
I did think the dust bunnies were cute though. I kept picturing the Tribbles from Star Trek, even though I'm pretty sure that's not exactly how they were supposed to look.
Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for providing me with an ARC of this book.
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