2024 fantasy romance, second of its series. The Villain was captured
by the king at the end of the previous book, so the first thing for
his assistant Evie to do is to rescue him.
Things certainly happen here, but there's no sense of progress.
Evie arranges the rescue, the two of them plan some goals and
necessary steps to achieve them, and they make some progress. But it
seems that every time they do something, another obstacle is thrown up
in front of them; whenever they might finally admit their feelings for
each other, there's another interruption with yet more family-related
trauma to be resolved. (At least two more books are planned.)
It's certainly great fun in between the frustration; this isn't quite
the classic middle volume of a trilogy in which nothing much happens,
since the problems they face by the end certainly aren't the ones they
had at the start. But the major factor in the lack of romantic
resolution is still a lack of communication, and I have a low
tolerance for that even in a single book.
That's a problem with the composite entity that is the book plus me,
of course, not an intrinsic problem with the book. The point of this
series is the ongoing unresolved romantic tension, the almost but not
quite, and if I am impatient to get to the resolution I was at least
not deceived as to the type of book I was reading.