Personal rating: 2.5 stars Goodreads rating at time of review: 3.97 stars Content rating: PG-13 (violence) Trigger warnings: manipulative partner, murder, death of parental figure, non-consensual kissing, attempted sexual assault. On a cozy fall morning, Kate Kole is nestled in a coffee shop in the city of Toronto reading her favourite novel when she accidentally kills a guy who's being rude to the coffee shop's cashier. Unfortunately for Kate, the person she killed was a fae assassin of the North Corner of Ever, visiting the human realm in secret. From there, four deadly fae assassins come to the human realm to hunt her down for breaking a fairy law and killing one of their own. Leading them is Prince Cressica Alabastian, the most feared and deadly fae assassin of the North and heir to the North Corner of Ever. After the assassins arrive in the human realm, things go terribly wrong. To Prince Cressica's horror, his assassins unwittingly get roped into running a cozy café on Kate Kole's behalf. To blend in, the fae assassins are forced to learn how to do basic human activities like cleaning up after themselves, driving without road rage, reading popular fantasy books at book club without getting into alpha male fights over what they’re reading, and in general, be nice, all to blend into regular human society. With a temper like no other, and deadly power that's unmatched, Prince Cressica seeks to get revenge on Kate Kole. But as he aims to strike where it will hurt her the most, the Prince finds himself enchanted by his human target in more ways than one. And when the darkness of the Ever Corners comes knocking at the human realm's door, he needs to make a choice that could cost him everything. (goodreads.com) I really, really, really wanted to like this book. The cover is adorable, the concept seems like so much fun, it was touted as the ultimate cozy urban fantasy—it seemed like it would be perfect for me. However… it just wasn’t for me. And the writing wasn’t even all that good. Not terrible by any means, but it reads like a coffee shop AU fanfic that has not been edited beyond a quick re-read before posting (which, to be fair, is how I “edit” all of my fanfics). I don’t want to be too harsh, but I am confused about why everyone on social media is hyping this book up so much. Let’s get into it though. First weird thing I want to mention: there’s a lot of pro-police content in this book. Regardless of your feelings about the police, I think we can all agree it’s kind of weird to have the line “And we can trust cops. Don’t let your pretentious partner make you think otherwise” (page 35) in a cozy fantasy novel. On this same note, the main character, Kate, goes to a police fundraiser (because her best-friend-sorta-sister is a cop) gala. In many fantasy books there is a ball or grand event that the characters dress up for and dance at, so it looked like this was the modern day equivalent of that trope for this book. It just seems a little off for it to be a police fundraiser, and even odder still is that the main character goes, but her love interest does not. So she doesn’t even get to dance with him at this stand-in ball, leaving me wondering why it was even necessary to have it. Even weirder, the whole scene was really just a set up to have Kate force one of the fae assassins to kiss someone’s shoe. All of the other assassins are horrified and are like “how could you do that?! Think of his traumatic back story!” even though we have not heard anything about his backstory up until this point. We, of course, later learn that the assassin she forced to kiss a shoe has very specific shoe kissing related trauma. I’m totally fine with learning that a character has trauma, but it was just weird that everyone acted like Kate should have known about his trauma even though she barely knows him. Also real weird of her and her cop best friend to force him to kiss a shoe in the first place. And for that to be the only noteworthy thing that happens at the gala. Okay, random police involvement aside, there were other problems with this story and some of them are very nitpicky. So, bear with me or don’t, but it’s my blog so I’m going to nitpick as much as I want. The romance was really not for me. The whole time I felt like Prince Cressica loathed Kate. And he was supposed to for a good portion of the book because he was trying to kill her. But when things got cozy and fun in the cafe, I still felt like he didn’t like her. He was just mean to her and called her stupid and occasionally rescued her. I don’t care how handsome he is, if I met him in real life, I wouldn’t even want to be friends with him, let alone be involved in romance. He’s kind of a jerk and he doesn’t stop being a jerk even when he admits that he has fallen in love. On the subject of the romance… I’m not a fan of how it got started in the first place. Cressica, when trying to kill Kate, kissed her against her will because his kiss was supposed to be magic and she’d be so enchanted that she would do whatever he told her, including kill herself (why he couldn’t just stab her with his fancy light sword instead, we’ll never know). The magic kiss backfires and instead he starts to fall in love with her. Sort of? There isn’t really evidence of this, they just tell us that the kiss was reversed and so now he’s enchanted. And when the kiss wears off, we’re still supposed to believe he likes her, even though he doesn’t act like it at all. And then, guess what, it turns out they are mates! Which never really gets explained so if you haven’t read a fantasy with “fated mates” in it before, sorry but you won’t be learning about it from this book. Worse still, was the power imbalance of the relationship at the end of the book. I don’t want to say too much and spoil anything, but Cressica manipulates Kate and humiliates her as the grand “happily ever after” ending to the story. And everyone is fine with that, including Kate. There were some “fairy godmothers” in this story who seemed like they were going to be cool. And they kinda were, for a little bit. But they also didn’t seem super relevant to the plot? They got into a bloody brawl with the four main fae assassins and they knit a magical pink sweater that never did anything, but apart from that I forgot about them most of the time. Nitpicky critique: Why the heck was the word “faeborn” used SO MUCH in this book? It was used to describe every little thing about the fae. Their “faeborn ears”,“faeborn feet”, “faeborn hands”, “faeborn heart”—pretty much any body part, if it was on a fae then the word “faeborn” had to be in front of it. It quickly got to be annoying along with the made up swear word “Queensbane”, which was used multiple times a page in some instances. And then, Kate would misuse big words so much throughout the story as a personality quirk. I wanted to tear my hair out at having to read all of the other characters turn into Inigo Montoya whenever Kate (a writer) used an SAT vocab word incorrectly. Okay, enough bashing. What did I like about this book? The cozy elements were, in fact, pretty cozy. I loved when it was Christmas time in the book and they had the cafe up and running. They drank warm beverages, went sledding, read books, and did generally cozy Christmas things. It took quite a while to get to the cozy part of this cozy fantasy, but when it finally did, the warm vibes delivered. The other assassins were also fun. Comedic relief characters for sure, but it seemed like they all had twisted backstories to be explored in later books. My guess is that the next book will feature the cop friend and one of the assassins falling in love because they were sort of flirting with each other in this book. Unfortunately, there really isn’t much else I can think of that I truly enjoyed about the book. So, I don’t really recommend it, honestly. I’m glad so many of the people who read it have enjoyed it, but it wasn’t for me. Well, I’m off to eat some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and keep the fae assassins from hogging them all. Until next time! Thanks for reading! Image sources: goodreads.com and giphy.com
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