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alvic3's review
5.0
Gripping from beginning to end, Tiana Warner is a wonderful storyteller. Such a great book!
simonlorden's review
4.0
I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I have... mixed feelings about this book. It's actually one of those ones that I was considering abandoning halfway, but I kept reading just in case it gets better, and then it actually did. There are two reasons for this: 1) Aries 181 is VERY different from what I was lead to expect, and it took me some time to get over that and enjoy it for what it is, 2) the characters really annoyed me at first, and again, it took me a while to warm up to them.
From the cover, the blurb and the tags, you would assume that the two women in the blurb will be in a romance and take down the evil supervillain together, right? Well, that's not really what happens for most of the book. Jess and Haley are both queer, and Jess has a girlfriend who occasionally shows up, but the F/F relationship is not central to the story. Jess is working on taking down Tony, like the blurb says, and meanwhile Tony and Halley... listen, I know Halley is named after the comet, but that is NOT what her name reminded me of when she had this twisted romance with the supervillain where they literally refer to each other as the King and Queen of tech.
Yep. Most of this book is basically Tony dragging a twenty-year-old woman into a Harley/Joker romance practically overnight, with all the crime, twistedness and abuse that entails. Frankly, I wasn't really sold on it at first, because Halley falls... way too quickly, and even with her background, I wasn't really SEEING that pull in Tony. I mean, come on, Halley is literally breaking into places and then torturing people for fun within a month of meeting him?
I admit I only started truly enjoying what this book was doing around the twist that is almost at the very end. That twist suddenly put the whole dynamic in the book in a different light, but I also felt cheated that I had to wait so long for it.
In the end, I liked Jess's character development, from her standing up to herself to her throwing out the lowkey sexist note she had up in her office. I also loved that the two women are both in toxic relationships (although to very different degrees) and they both end up being able to walk away from that. I still wasn't quite sold on Haley's character arc, but I'll take it. It was also kind of interesting, because for most of the book I was convinced one of the characters would turn out to be another villain, but nah, he's "just" a sexist asshat.
The ending felt like there might be a sequel, so if that's true, I'm curious where the story will go.
I have... mixed feelings about this book. It's actually one of those ones that I was considering abandoning halfway, but I kept reading just in case it gets better, and then it actually did. There are two reasons for this: 1) Aries 181 is VERY different from what I was lead to expect, and it took me some time to get over that and enjoy it for what it is, 2) the characters really annoyed me at first, and again, it took me a while to warm up to them.
From the cover, the blurb and the tags, you would assume that the two women in the blurb will be in a romance and take down the evil supervillain together, right? Well, that's not really what happens for most of the book. Jess and Haley are both queer, and Jess has a girlfriend who occasionally shows up, but the F/F relationship is not central to the story. Jess is working on taking down Tony, like the blurb says, and meanwhile Tony and Halley... listen, I know Halley is named after the comet, but that is NOT what her name reminded me of when she had this twisted romance with the supervillain where they literally refer to each other as the King and Queen of tech.
Yep. Most of this book is basically Tony dragging a twenty-year-old woman into a Harley/Joker romance practically overnight, with all the crime, twistedness and abuse that entails. Frankly, I wasn't really sold on it at first, because Halley falls... way too quickly, and even with her background, I wasn't really SEEING that pull in Tony. I mean, come on, Halley is literally breaking into places and then torturing people for fun within a month of meeting him?
I admit I only started truly enjoying what this book was doing around the twist that is almost at the very end. That twist suddenly put the whole dynamic in the book in a different light, but I also felt cheated that I had to wait so long for it.
In the end, I liked Jess's character development, from her standing up to herself to her throwing out the lowkey sexist note she had up in her office. I also loved that the two women are both in toxic relationships (although to very different degrees) and they both end up being able to walk away from that. I still wasn't quite sold on Haley's character arc, but I'll take it. It was also kind of interesting, because for most of the book I was convinced one of the characters would turn out to be another villain, but nah, he's "just" a sexist asshat.
The ending felt like there might be a sequel, so if that's true, I'm curious where the story will go.
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