TL;DR: Yikes on Bikes, Absolutely no thank you.
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!
Plot: I think it’s supposed to be a gothic teacher/student romance but it was so poorly written and researched.
Characters: Nope. Didn’t like anyone here.
Setting: Don’t worry, we’re told where we are at least 200 times. It’s Trinity.
Romance: Yet again. Nope.
Summary:
She is the daughter of morticians, studying Botany at Trinity College, Dublin. He is her Morbid Anatomy professor. And the Fae are possessing the good people of Dublin. Only Atta and Professor Murdoch can exorcize the fae, but can they fight their forbidden feelings for one another in the process?
Thoughts:
So this is meant to be a gothic, 1990’s Irish romance with a plague. Instead what I think this started as was some vaguely historical romance that the author abruptly changed to the 90s and then didn’t even attempt to research anything about Ireland before throwing all the stereotypes into the book she could. The characters didn’t dress, as they should (and trust me they really wanted us to know how they were dressed). They didn’t act how they should, and for a university setting some of these people were very idiotic.
Add to this a set of characters that were the actual worst representation of their kind. Atta is ‘not like other girls’ and wishes she had girl friends, but IMMEDIATELY stereotypes and calls other women names and judges them. Sonder is as shallow as a puddle and comes off incredibly lame. The entitled and pretentiousness of these characters had my skin actually crawling.
All and all… I really didn’t enjoy this. And it’s a shame. I also have some concerns as I’ve seen some rumblings of bad behavior on the author’s part? I don’t know anything about it (I don’t exist on tiktok) but based on the writing and storytelling I can heartily say I don’t recommend this.
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