Tone of Voice

TL;DR
The romance killed my interest in the plot before the plot even started.


I'm doing a bang-up job this month of reading sequels that I thought were guaranteed for me to like and being horribly, irredeemably disappointed.

This book starts of so painfully slow - and it's not even the good kind of slowly building things up, but the ‘here, have 80 pages of romance building and then another 70 pages of ‘ladadade, we're working, but it feels like a vacation' before the plot even starts' slow.

The two biggest problems I have with the book is 1) the romance. (The romance infuses every cell of this book in such a way that you can never forget that there's something going on between Xandri and Diver. wiggles eyebrows Don't forget, they're having smooch-y feelings. (...Yes, it's also handled with that approximate level of maturity as well.))

And, 2) the fact that Diver becomes a co-narrator. (Look, I'm usually all for more narrators. But the first book worked as well as it did, I think, because we crawled inside Xan's head and never left. In this one, we have rotating first person POV - which is almost universally a terrible idea on it's own - and... Honestly, I sort of loathe Diver by this point. There's too much of his focus on Xandri's physical appearance and I'm a little skived out by him. Though, being 100% fair, most of my problem with him is likely because of his constant harping over putting on his ‘big boy pants' (yes, that is what he calls it) and admitting he likes Xan because of putting on his ‘big boy pants'. Instead of just, I don't know, acting like an adult - which, contrary to appearances - he actually is.)

So...yeah.

There is a plot here. It is good. The romance has been shoved so far down my throat that I don't care.