The Takeover

Thank you to NetGalley and RBMedia for the ARC of this book, releasing January 30, 2024.

This is an enemies-to-lovers romance where the woman is the boss of a tech company, who is loved by her employees, while he's a ruthless business man in charge of acquisitions. He's coming to buy her company and she does not want to let that happen, especially not to him.

The overall story: The premise was quite fun, but the arc of the story was so clear that it was too predictable. In romance stories, we already know they end up together, so why make the rest of the plot predictable, too?

The characters: They both felt quite immature. I think making Nami and Jae's rivalry high-school based and having them still hung up on that was unfortunate. They both went to law school and the situation of the takeover was a good enough reason for them to be enemies. The valedictorian conflict just felt silly. For me to be rooting for a relationship, I need to find the characters compelling and believable; I felt neither thing reading this.

The writing style: This book was packed full of cliche phrases. Everything was written in the most basic way, reminding me a bit of how middle grade book characters talk. And if it was just the character dialogue, I could attribute this to their bland personalities, but the narration also had tons of them.

The audiobook narration: I think the narration had a big impact on my enjoyment of this book. This is going to sound harsh, but if I had bought this audiobook, I would've returned it and either DNFd the book or gotten the ebook. The female narrator, Chieko Hidaka, never let me forget she was reading a book. I did not feel the character was embodied by the narrator. The voice acting felt stiff and disingenuous. The male narrator, Donald Chang, was better at embodying his character and I could picture him more clearly.

Overall: I would've preferred to read this story as an ebook or physical book because something about hearing the dozens of cliche phrases per chapter made me cringe quite hard. The story had its enjoyable moments, but I did not have a good time listening to this.