Overhyped and underwhelming.

Despite being promoted as a monster romance and enemies-to-lovers romance, the book doesn't deliver on either front.

I picked this up on impulse thanks to the enthusiastic cover quote from CS Pacat, who wrote Dark Rise, one of my favourite books from last year. That being the case, it drives me mad that this debut has gotten the whole YA marketing circus with the book crate editions and everything, whereas Pacat's sensational fourth novel -- which outmatches this one in every regard -- has gotten much less attention, I assume due to its mid-story swerve to  an absolutely electric m/m 'romance' (not really lol) slathered with glorious BDSM subtext.

By contrast, in this novel, perennial fan-favourites 'the background gays' -- a gay couple who are present and prominent at one critical moment of the plot for the sake of representation, but not present or prominent enough to risk alienating the majority straight female typical YA target demographic -- are back for the second half of this novel (the sickeningly sweet variant, in this case).

On the whole the story was inoffensive enough, but ultimately forgettable. The conceit that the heroine is the 'monster' hunted by the hero ends up feeling more than a bit toothless owing to the fact that  'monsters' in the setting appear to be just humans who have the power to time-travel by absorbing life force from regular humans. Early on, our 'hero' Nick single-handedly slays a room full of (cartoonishly villainous) 'monsters' with a sword, whereas the 'monstrous' heroine commits 'murder' in abstract by stealing short amounts of time from the lifespans of other humans without their knowledge.

One of these things is not like the other, despite all the heroine's self-imposed guilt-trips insisting otherwise, and it's hard not to suspect that the author just chickened out of having the 'monstrous' heroine straight-up kill someone because that might make her, well...too monstrous, and therefore unlikeable?

I hated the ending, which unavoidably invites comparison with what begins as the best and ends as the worst scene of The Grisha trilogy -- the ending of Siege and Storm, where  Alina appears to surrender to her feelings for the Darkling and her desire to harness her own powers, only for the first-person narration to yank the rug out from under the reader when Alina 'reveals' that it was all a trick, she only played at seducing dear Darkles in order to hold him still long enough to bring the building down on both their heads. 

Something similar happens at the end of this book, although not quite as viciously executed (on the part of the author, or the heroine...) 

The central premise is that the power of true love is great enough to transcend the (very poorly explained) broken timeline, the slaughter of families, violences committed against one another...except at the end the heroine basically decides that, even though she doesn't completely blame the 'hero' for having slaughtered all these monsters (owing to the circumstances), they still can't be together, even though the cosmic force of time itself is trying to help the soulmates get together as they should be...

So in the end, true love wasn't enough, after all. What a downer. 

It is apparently the first of a trilogy (a fact which is stated nowhere on or in the book itself), so where there are sequels, there's hope, I suppose...