*I received an ecopy of this book from the author. This has not influenced my review.*

This was a nice little slice-of-life fantasy romance. The general vibe was chill and somewhat cozy. It essentially starts with the Dark Lord being defeated, and the main character was someone who’d been forced to work for him but is glad to be free. There’s no big plotline, it’s mostly just the relationship, working in a bookstore, and Jayce deciding what to do now that he has his freedom. There are a few fight scenes, but not a ton of action. And it’s small in scope, so not much world-building since it just wasn’t needed.

There were a lot of forward time jumps where it was sort of summarized that the characters spent a lot of time together and did xyz every day and Jayce realized he cared for them, etc. That made it hard for me to actually feel the emotions. I do like knowing the characters spent time together over a while because that makes feelings more believable for me, but I would’ve liked to see more of that time, more in-the-moment scenes.

That being said, the romance was still sweet. There were just enough in-the-moment scenes for me to feel something between them, to be excited for them to kiss or do whatever more they wanted to do for the first time. And they were very sweet with each other, very loving and reverent and not wanting to push.

Also, this was a queernormative world where no one seemed to care about queer genders or sexualities.

Overall, a chill and stress-free fantasy romance great for unwinding with!

*Rating: 3.5 Stars // Read Date: 2023 // Format: Ebook via TTS*