A socially anxious zookeeper working in phoenix conservation gets the chance of a lifetime to breed phoenixes and falls in love with her rival/frenemy from the griffin show in the process. Sounds nice, right?
Books like this one almost frustrate me more than the real stinkers that deserve one or two stars. It’s ALMOST there for me. The premise=great. The themes=great. A convergence of genres that I love, plus magical animals and nerds=great. But none of it came together the way I wanted it to, and the writing itself seemed to get in the way more often than not.
I also had no feelings whatsoever for any of the human characters, again because of the writing style, which read as really immature to me, in the way that a new writer or a writer who just doesn’t have IT (whatever it is) can’t make the leap from words on the page to bringing the story to life in your mind. My edition came with a forward from the author about how much of herself she put into this book, and I honestly think that might also be part of the problem. She was too close to it, and couldn’t get far enough away to make it work for other people. I mean, obviously this is just my opinion and the book seems to be working for other people, but I am just so disappointed by it. Absolutely mediocre book for me, and I almost DNFed it about three times, but kept going bc cute animals.
The book is also very, very bloated. A cozy fantasy romance about a zookeeper has no business being longer than 400 pages, and this book hits a whopping 470. There was SO MUCH of this book that could have been cut out, plotlines and scenes alike. And that would have actually made room for more development of the stuff I did want to see, like the romance between the two main characters, and interactions with the cute animals.
Anyway, this was basically a miss for me in how mid it was. Not sure if I will read more from this author. We’ll see!