This was: a slog!

There’s a way that Gen X women write young modern women that makes me forget that our female lead characters are not 45 year old divorcées. I seriously kept forgetting that Frankie wasn’t just an emotionally unregulated middle aged woman by the way she spoke and handled conflict. 18 year olds are incredibly immature, because they’re basically still children without fully developed brains, but there’s still SOME logic to them. For the love of all things holy, I would like authors to remember to make them multifaceted!

I generally did not enjoy Frankie for the reason stated above, but also, I genuinely did not see what she found so appealing about Fausto? Like. I get that he’s supposed to be unlikeable. That’s the premise, sure. But, couldn’t we get them to have a couple of conversations before they started ******* that made us see what she saw in him? But, no. Too much to ask, apparently.

Giulio and Paolo are such tragic characters, I’ll likely push through to see their storyline play out, but I am nervous that Joanna Shupe will not be handling it with care. In fact, im 90% sure she has not.

What saved this from this being a single star was the angst. Fausto’s hissy fit and him alienating all those that actually care about him was good. I enjoyed that. But the ending? Meh. The bad guy was SO incredibly obvious, and it’s so incredibly obvious to me who is aiding Enzo, it wasn’t really shocking.

I also eye rolled so heavily when she said that Zia was “flaunting” the rules. You mean flouting the rules, ma’am. You’re a traditionally published author. You can afford to pay for an editor to proofread your dumb little self indulgence project.

This is all to say, whilst I am going to finish this series bc I hate myself, based off of how Joanna Shupe handled these characters, I have very little faith for the remainder of these books. Also, I will be placing her historicals on my never read list because, frankly, fuuuuuck this.

Mafia Mistress - Likewise Book Reviews

6 Reviews