by Mira González
Thanks to NetGalley, RB media and the author for the opportunity to listen to and review this ALC.
This is a grand mix of genres, from paranormal mystery, to romance to science fiction with a bit of satire and a lot of magic thrown in. And while that seems like a bit of a mess, the author does a good job keeping the storyline coherent. While there are some debut author missteps, overall this is a fun and heartfelt novel about love, family and friends and acceptance.
We are dropped into the story basically in the middle. Reggie and their best friend/ rival Calvin are paranormal investigators. They’ve been called to investigate a haunted vacuum and a cryptid sighting in the Midwest, so they team up with their individual campers (Calvin has the fancy airstream, Reggie has an old Winnebago that seems to be sentient). While their reasons for investigating the weird and supernatural may be different, they tend to work together quite often. There is an attraction there, even though it started with a mutual distrust where each party wanted to keep the other under watch.
Reggie has a strange toddler that she travels with and brings to investigations. It’s not her biological child, she’s actually some kind of feral shape shifting creature that showed up on her doorstep a few years ago and remains perpetually under three, and also has some sort of magic or magical device that fools Calvin into thinking it’s a perfectly normal toddler that has not stayed the same age over the years. Don’t think too much about the logistics of this, just go along with it because the novel will continue to give the reader more crazy happenings that have no explanation.
Throughout the first third of the book, we learn a bit about the world, which is full of sentient beings and strange cryptids, that remain hidden from the rest of the world. Reggie is being followed and receiving threatening anonymous messages. We get hints about Reggie’s past, that it was mostly unhappy, that she has an ulterior motive for removing haunted or possessed objects from houses and there is a pressing danger. Eventually, she has to let Calvin in, both romantically and revealing a few of her secrets, in order to keep the both of them safe, and we learn that our cute feral toddler is being searched for by a nefarious secret group.
The first part of the book ends with a big reveal, and then we hit the second part, which covers a lot of Reggie’s past through flashbacks and new characters, with the final third of the book the big BIG reveal as to why all of this is happening, including alien encounters, invasions and a final battle that included aliens, robots, werewolves and magical weapons. OK, it’s a bit crazy but I swear it all makes sense.
There is a lot to love about this book – the romance is heartfelt, and adult themed but closed door. Reggie struggles with a longing for family, but slowly comes to realize that her found family carries all the love she needs. She struggles with a mother that used her rather than nurtured her and has to decide whether to hold on to that hate or forgive her. She has to come to terms with making choices that maybe caused more harm than good, even if it was an impossible choice. There is a lot for Reggie to learn and grow as a character, even how to ask for help. All within an adventurous and creative story setting. The plotline will be quite different from the average Romantasy/ Sci Fi book in the genre.
This is a standalone novel and covers a lot of ground so the audiobook is quite long. The story is front and centre for the first 2 sections of the book, but in the last section the author falls back on a lot of monologuing and telling the story instead of showing it. While this is not unusual for a book that relies on a lot of flashbacks and history, the amount of space dedicated for Reggie to worry about what her friends thinks of her, what her family thinks of her, her history with her mother makes an already long book slightly more bloated than it needs to be. The ending has been foreshadowed quite early on and an intelligent reader should be able to sense the regrets and heartbreak that Reggie has had to endure for most of her life. I felt that a lot of the explanation in the final act was overkill. My main reaction to most of the inner dialogue was “yes, yes, hurry up and get to the good parts, everyone loves Reggie, we know that”
I’ll put that to debut novel writer-itis, or the inability to trust your readers to get what you’re selling.
Unfortunately the woolgathering nature of the last part was such a let down to the strong start that it lost a few marks as a great book. The audio narration was wonderful, the voice actor for Reggie really captured her voice. For LGBTQ+ rep, the main character is non binary who dresses like a male at times, which is emphasized more strongly in the first part of the novel, although it’s unclear whether to refer to them as They or She. When out with Calvin, they are referred to as his boyfriend, but when Reggie is reunited with her family she is Regina, a daughter and a sister. I’m not sure if this is an identity that gets forgotten after the first part of the novel or is just an example of the fluidity of their NB nature. Without revealing too many spoilers, there are revelations about Reggie’s past that explains her non gender specific status, so I will choose to believe it’s intentional and not something the author brought up and failed to follow through
Overall I gave this novel a 3.75, rounded up to a 4 for applications that do not have partial ratings.
