Emily Noon

iiiiiii wanted to like this more than i actually did, unfortunetly. i listened to the audiobook version narrated by abby craden and she did a wonderful job, and i will check out more of her narrations because she is great at bringing a story to life. but the actual story for me kinda just rubbed me the wrong way on a couple of points that i never quite managed to get over, i think.

i rlly enjoyed the first half or so of the book!! (nearly 10 hours into the audio!!!) but once aurora and evie started getting closer and more in a relationship... the less i liked it. which, was a bummer. one reason was just like, personal preference, and aurora as a character didn't quite click for me. i rlly liked evie, but aurora just had a lot of qualities that just aren't rlly my cup of tea. and, look, i get that this is literally a world of beast/animal shifters, they are gonna have anamalistic qualities, and playing around with that a bit is fun! but if this was a cishet couple instead of two women, iiiii would have been livid reading it.

aurora has a lot of moments once the two of them are sleeping together that like... come across as really manipulative and rubbed me the wrong way. there were a lot of like "if you don't let me do X, then i'm gonna lose my mind/go crazy/not be able to control myself/my beast etc." annnnnd, yeah, this is a fictional world of beast shifters! i get it! i enjoy playing around with sort of fucked up dynamics as much as the next person, tbh, but smth abt the way this came across, with aurora getting, RLLY territorial/like not even giving evie time to like, deal with a situation herself, or tell a dude off for flirting on her own, without aurora coming in hot and crazy just started to get on my nerves the more it happened. a lot of the language felt super manipulative. like, if there had been ONE scene, where evie was like... "you know, i had that right? you could have just been my backup if i asked for you to" instead, then i would have gotten over it entierly. but that never happened.

i'm especially talking abt the scene in the cafe where the wolf shifter was flirting with evie, and aurora literally almost murdered him. like, i think because there was SO MUCH build up of aurora being self-concious abt ppl reacting to her beasts, the narrative couldn't have evie even ONCE be like... "can you chill, i got this?" and that (for me) did a disservice to their relationship and kept annoying me the more it happened. this was, again, more of a personal thing and it might not have come across that way for everyone but it kept happening and it annoyed me.

however, iiiiii RLLY took issue with the way there was suddenly child sexual violence just shoehorned in for no fucking reason. for context, there isn't anything graphic or explicit in the text, it's a reference to something that happened years ago to a character, but it felt totally unecessary and added on to a situation that was ALREADY really violent and traumatic, and it just... pissed me off. like, what the fuck? aurora was already kidnapped, tortured, watched her father be murdered and tortured and you're like, you know what, and ALSO a bunch of grown men raped an 11 year old to lure her father into a trap. that's... so fucking unecessary. i really think rape and sexual violence should only be included in stories for a REASON, this... brought no value to the story, it was just more violence, more truama, to be sure we know "hey, this character is so truamatized but they're so good, don't you love them?" idk. it was kind of the last straw, for me.

i realize i'm being pretty negative on a story that i gave three stars to, which, is my average, "hey i mostly liked this book!" rating, and the thing is... this is a long book! i listened to over 20 hours, i liked a lot of things in it! i think the worldbuilding was rlly cool. i think the concept of the shifters was awesome, i actually do rlly like a lot of the shifter/anamalstic themes, i liked evie and her family a lot! i thought the relationship with aurora and her mother was so complex and interesting and fucked up a little and RIGHT up my mother/daughter feelings alley. i just had issues with a lot of things surrounding aurora and her characterization and narrative. and... that's a bummer, but it's not the end of the world. i'll probably at least check out what else the author does in the future, but i'm not keeping a lookout or anything.… (meer)