So in recent times, I have read tons of romance, and it has helped me broaden my horizons. I think this is probably one of the better ones for sure. For starters I did not hate the main characters - Iris is actually quite charming alongside Roman. The setting is interesting, but of course sadly, that's only back dressing for most of this novel. The idea of awoken Gods forging a war and using mortals as their soldiers is great. I love that shit. I also love the ending a lot alongside the implication that Dacre is saving some soldiers on Enva's side and using the life debt to force them into servitude.
So a lot of my enjoyment of this book was literally up, down, up. The book is a lot of fun and really reminiscent to a fantasy You've Got Mail up until Roman joins her on the frontlines, it dips even harder after they get caught up with the grenade and Roman gets injured. From that point it gets tedious. There's a lame 'you lied to me!' interaction that gets swept away immediately, then they jump from courting to marriage in about a day. And in the haste of all this so much of their personalities are just lost. It's all so bland and twee and everyone loves that they're together and they put together a quick marriage and then everyone celebrates.
Both of the Main Characters had quite likeable personalities and it really sucked that under the swooning love nonsense, it got lost. That being said even for enemies to lovers, this is tame and a little bit eh... they both want the same job, they never even throw stones into the other's path; there's barely any antagonizing. Outside of the letters they barely know each other to be enemies or lovers.
Side plots get dropped left and right. Roman's engagement? Dropped. His family drama? Ignored. The columnist position? Pushed aside. The Alouettes? Who cares? (Those plotlines might come up again in the sequel, but after they are dropped in this book, they are dropped. They aren't mentioned again.) The characters have no curious bone in their body. Roman's jumpsuit vanishes, and NOBODY bats an eye. The dash packs they could have ignored, but the jumpsuit? This bugged me a LOT.
Also I just don't think that I vibe with this author's writing style: She talks about salty skin an unnatural amount along with things being ethereal. She's definitely a fan of tell, don't show while also somehow focusing on meandering, boring and mundane parts of this.
I wish that Iris had actually done something interesting with her war correspondence job rather than just being told about what she was doing.
This book is fine. That's all I can really say. I didn't hate it like certain other books that this one gets lumped with but I'm mostly just disappointed by a lot of the things it could have been.
