The River She Became

📑 "Eh?" Safiyya welled on her. "You thought she might steal an ancient fea artifact from the citadel and sentence us all to death? You might have let us know sooner then. We could have all packed our bags earlier." At first, I considered it to be a slow start. The synopsis was great, even more to my liking than the author's previous work, and I surprisingly enjoyed her debut, so I wanted to give this one a shot, excitedly. Ironically, I enjoyed For She Is Wrath way more, even though the current one has a setting, that speaks a lot more to me: treasure-hunt in fairyland. We follow both povs, the fmc Yaseema and the mmc Kiyan. They meet at about 20-25% into the book. The beginning to me felt rather slow and didn't really grip me but I was interested enough to keep going. Honestly, I don't think the characters were well developed. To me, everyone but the two main characters felt like npcs. Including the villain. I didn't care for any of them and the villain was just evil because he was the villain - you know? There was no depth to him, he just wanted power and was cruel (and a little bit oblivious), that's all. It felt so flat. My biggest issue with the book however was the romance, which was not believable at all. Kiyan finds Yaseema intriguing from the get go. They barely spoke and suddenly, when seeing her from a distance, he imagined running his hands through her hair to untangle it - why?? Guys, you have met once. Briefly. Then, he secretly observed her doing magic once and immediately understood that she is able to find powerful magical objects with it ... she didn't even do that really in this very moment. The insta-love really put me off. They have no reason to want each other that much so early on, they have barely interacted. They had no connection, no build-up, no banter, no getting-to-know each other ... nothing. And yet: 📑 "[...] the tension between us [...]" WHAT TENSION?? 📑 "He is going to kiss me, I thought." WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT?? YOU HAVE NO REASON TO ASSUME AS MUCH. (he didn't kiss her then.) 📑 "The air was on fire between us" ... Yeah? Are you sure? Because it's quite chilly over here. If it weren't for them wanting each other without any reason, this could be a decent story. A bit boring maybe, but decent. Unfortunately, the author even managed to mess up the only-one-bed-trope. how?? Also, the amount of times Yaseema got pulled to his chest or bumped into him was ridiculous. At the point where the romance actually happened, I still felt nothing and was utterly annoyed by it. 📑 "What are we fighting for, if not love?" How cheesy do you wanna be? Don't like it. So, surprisingly, I'm not going to read the sequel. And for those who are wondering: she never became a river.