Ireland Gill

This one reads very amateurish.
The book expects us to be deeply emotionally invested in all the characters from the beginning without doing any work to get there.
I think the author was going for a flawed main character to make the story more interesting and the concept could've worked but the execution fell so flat that it just became a chore to read about.

My biggest problem with this book is how incredibly juvenile the MC and Crow were. I frequently read this criticism in reviews about characters being too juvenile and usually I can see where the reviewers are coming from but the term frequently fails to address the actual problem and the characters being juvenile is actually just young people having fun and the reviewers having forgotten what it means to be young. Not in this case. Here they act truly juvenile constantly. The MC is supposed to be 21 but without any clues about her age, I would assume she is 14-16 without exaggeration just from her behavior.

My second problem was the constant melodrama. The book is written as if it expects that we are deeply emotionally invested in mundane and laughably minor problems. It goes from deep emotional upset to resolution in a blink of an eye over and over and it makes it almost impossible to care for any of it. It reads like a rapid-fire soap opera. And the most frustrating thing about this is that it really doesn't need to be like that. There are more than enough actually tragic and upsetting things that have the potential to create an actual deep emotional bond with the reader if it would just take the time to develop it. Instead, we get one cheap attempt after another at unearned drama for no good reason.

The third thing that really annoyed me and is kind of a pet peeve of mine is the supernatural emotional connection the MC has to the H because they are soulmates or something or because they have been a couple in previous lives or something like that. It wasn't explained in the first half of the book I've read. I don't have an inherent problem with this concept and it can be quite cute if used well, but in this case, it is used to constantly excuse the insolent, condescending, and disrespectful behavior of the H. He can do whatever he wants really because she is emotionally bound to him anyway and he seems to be aware of this and presumes he can treat her in this infuriatingly arrogant way.
And while the MC constantly throws tantrums about it like a four-year-old, she ultimately lets him get away with every single shitty thing he says or does. Don't get me wrong, it's not like he is a major bully or anything. It's really only minor things compared to many other books but I just can't with MCs that let others just walk right over them especially because this MC was clearly meant to be strong and a bit stubborn, and was presented as such in the beginning. But as soon as the H gets involved she devolves into this juvenile cry-baby without a backbone.

One thing I very much liked, that I usually find in more amateurish writing like this, is the absence of typical story beat patterns like you find in a lot of soulless UF that is produced at the UF factory. Despite all this criticism this at least felt unique. I am probably much more frustrated about its flaws because there are many aspects I liked and wanted to read more about.
I liked the premise, I liked flawed, drinking, and depressed MC as a starting point. But aside from my earlier criticisms, there was too little substance to the entire thing. The whole setup ends up being far too contrived to pull me in effectively. It doesn't feel like the author actually has a good explanation for the whole thing and that is the reason she is so stingy with explanations. At the same time, all the information we learn about the MCs actual circumstances which she had no clue about herself is presented in a long, blunt, and in-your-face info dump.

All in all just an ok read I didn't have the patience to finish.… (mais)