***ARC provided by the publisher for review
I was super stoked for this collection of short stories (yay astrology love stories!), but the result did not match my expectations at all! Each story begins with an introduction to the signs in Venus, where each explores relationships and interpersonal relations – in theory the perfect way to set the tone for each story, while also providing a short but in-depth explanation of astrology tropes for those less familiar. But then each story proceeds to have their protagonist act out their story as the Sun sign rather than Venus. Yes, a person can have their Sun and Venus in the same sign, but with the exception of one story this is at no point made clear, and it would have been far simpler to just introduce the stories with a brief explanation of the Sun signs rather than Venus. Astrological pet peeves aside (though they remained a niggling annoyance throughout), the stories themselves often weren’t of the best quality either. Most of the authors chose to trade on played out tropes, most of the characters lacked anything but superficial depth, and some of the plots were severely lacking in development full out. Yes, we’re here for trope-y love stories, but at least make the characters interesting or their stories eye-catching! The only story that had decent world building that I wanted to explore more was Cam Montgomery’s story “Formation,” which is ironic because Ophiuchus is not even an astrological sign, it’s a constellation. UGH. And, they barely got into the story before it ended, because it was too damned short! Double UGH! Oh well, some story collections can’t have everything, and my expectations were clearly far too high. ( )