(Magical Romantic Comedies #11)
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Genres: Adult, Urban Fantasy
After a deal with loan sharks sours, Darlene’s brother is permanently transformed into a chipmunk. Not one to accept impossibility as a good excuse for failure, she’s determined to rescue her brother and secure revenge against those who’d poisoned him with grade-a transformatives.
If she wants to perform a miracle, she’ll need to join forces with a divine, but the man upstairs and his angels refuse to help.
None of the other so-called benevolent divines are willing to help her, either.
Running out of time and options, Darlene prepares to storm the gates of hell for her brother.
She never expected to fall in love with the Devil.
Warning: this novel contains a woman with a chip on her shoulder, humor, and one hell of a hero. Proceed with caution.
Thank you to Giselle from Xpresso Book Tours for letting me join the tour and for providing me a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. Check out the other posts from the tour here.
Overall Thoughts
This book was not what I expected. I went into it thinking I was getting a typical Urban Fantasy with lots of action and magic and ass-kicking. It wasn’t. It was, as described, a magical romantic comedy. Unfortunately this meant that I took quite a while to get into it, and to get used to the writing style, which is also pretty different from my normal reads. I did end up warming up to the characters and enjoying it in the end. This is number 11 in the series, and since I haven’t read any of the others, I was worried about missing things, but I really didn’t. At times I felt like I may have been missing some world-building, but the characters and the story are pretty well self-contained. I thought it was a quirky take on angels and demons. Overall I had fun with the characters, especially because the MC Darlene is a snow-leopard shifter, which is my favourite animal!
Things I Liked
I think Darlene’s shifting ability is done in a really unique way. She doesn’t fully shift at all in the book, but she often goes around with ears and a tail, or even fully furry but still in human shape. She has some very positive self-love vibes going on too. She loves her spots, and her tail and loves being who she is, even if some people - her boss - think she might be diseased (with lycanthropy). She is a very bold and determined character, literally willing to take over hell to help her brother. She has a lot of feline traits (she likes fish, and napping) which I thought was a really cool way to characterise a shifter.
There are definitely funny parts in the book, including succubus bachelorettes, a sexually repressed Devil with a spot fetish, and an MC who gets very murdery when she's Hangry. There’s lots of sarcastic and snarky dialogue, swearing, and the occasional pun. I like that the angels were actually a bit sassy and had a good sense of humour too, though I’m still not sure why they had no heads or nipples. However, I found some parts of the book are actually quite dark, including the beginning. The bad guy is really a nasty piece of work.
The world-building with all the different 'divines' is really cool. I would have liked to see more of the Greek and Egyptian Gods, as they only get mentioned. One of the things I was missing with the world-building was the ‘emergence’ of magic, which only gets mentioned once or twice, but with no real background info. I’m sure it must get explained more in previous books but what I did read seemed pretty cool.
Her brother gets turned into a chipmunk and she keeps threatening to eat him if he doesn’t behave himself, and there's nothing he can do about it! Darlene is the typical big sister type who hates her brother but also protects him and would never let anyone hurt him.
Things I didn't like
It all just seems a bit too easy for Darlene, with no real challenges involved. The archangels tell here everything she needs to know, and they can see the future, so it’s all just too convenient. She isn't really taking any risks because she knows it will turn out fine.
Darlene made a lot of plans for revenge and murder but ends up doing hardly any of it herself. I thought that was a shame because we didn’t get to see her do much ass-kicking, just planning to do the ass-kicking.
There was a lot of dialogue. A lot. I guess this is part of the author’s style, which is partly what took me so long to get used to. I did end up enjoying it by the end, but I found it a bit repetitive, and it also got in the way of the action.
The romance was very obvious from the start, with very overt flirting, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I suppose that’s what you would expect when you have such bold, unapologetic characters.
AUTHOR BIO:
RJ Blain suffers from a Moleskine journal obsession, a pen fixation, and a terrible tendency to pun without warning.
In her spare time, she daydreams about being a spy. Her contingency plan involves tying her best of enemies to spinning wheels and quoting James Bond villains until satisfied.
Thanks for being on the tour! :)
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