Review:

I hate giving vanilla feedback for an author's debut, since I know how much love and hard work goes into their writing, however, I wasn't a fan of this novel. It wasn't bad, there just wasn't anything about this story that I particularly connected with, and I found myself skimming most of it to get to the end. No aspect of the story pulled me in, or stood out to me.

 I struggled to connect with either main character. Adanne, although she has a heart of gold, starts off a little crusty. My first reaction was to dislike her, although she did get a bit better as the story went on. John was fine. I didn't really dislike him or like him either way. Although in no way was either character or their story perfect, they kind of felt like Hallmark channel characters. 

The first few lines of the story bothered me as well, as they were very choppy sentences. I'm not sure if the rest of the book was written that way or not- probably because I skimmed most of it, and therefore didn't notice. 

Review:

Luke is a fun, slightly gruff, cinnamon roll of a character, who steals the show. His love interest, Ellie, (also known as Princess Elliana) has layers and some fun aspects to her personality as well, however, I struggled to get into the princess/commoner trope, probably since it's been done so often. It rarely seems to happen in real life, so the abundance of books with this trope seems a bit overdone.  

Loyally, Luke is filled with other such tropes, which are meant to be obvious, since gruff Luke has a thing about tropes... and romance, in general. However, I just couldn't appreciate the irony of them-- probably because I share some of Luke's sarcastic romantic sensibilities. Out of all the characters, I felt I related the most to Luke, which made his POV the most interesting and fun for me. 

I also think that I might have appreciated the storyline, tropes and all, if I had read the first two books (I guess this is a series? Even though it's not technically listed as one, as far as I can see). As it was, I didn't feel that I could fully appreciate the characters like I wanted to. Izzy and Penelope, Luke's sisters, appear in the story mainly in text-chat form, which was a fun element to the story and I think really adds to the interest. However, since I never got to "meet" them in books one and two, I felt like I was being introduced into a fun family dynamic that I really wanted to engage with, but since I didn't know who anyone was, I was just trying to hang on and figure out who the heck everyone was and how they were all related. 

If you like cute Hallmark movies and fun rom-coms, this might just be the book for you. I'm now thinking of going back and reading books 1 and 2 so I can reevaluate and, hopefully, fully appreciate the story.