72

This book had such a cool premise and I really wanted to love it, but my reading experience was rather… bumpy.

The tone jumps around. Sometimes the prose is super formal and mechanical, sometimes it's more typical of contemporary/dark romances. The characters' voices blur together, and there were numerous times that, without dialogue tags, I had to take a moment to figure out which character was speaking.

The bigger issue, though, is the timeline. The whole story is built around a specific time limit, so the countdown should be super solid. Instead, I spent a lot of time flipping back to confirm what hour we were supposed to be in rather than sinking into the story.

There are also some continuity hiccups. Mornings repeat themselves with scenes reusing the same phrases, verbatim, and some scenes contradict each other between paragraphs. Obviously, they weren't enough of a dealbreaker for me to put the book down, but they were adding up.

Emotionally, I wanted so much more. The premise seemed to promise nitty-gritty tension but it didn't deliver. I was following along with the story mostly to see what would happen when the clock ran out, versus an investment in the characters.

All that said, the ending did leave me kind of curious about what Nell will do next. But I'm not sure that I'll read more to find out.