Reviews

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

hsumanityreads's review

adventurous emotional mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This book 😭 a sweeping tale that began in The Hidden Blade, continued across years and continents, waging battles against villains and entitled females, then finally ending exactly as it should. ST is able to crush us and keep us coming back for more.

We get the story of Catherine Blade and Leighton Atwood told from their beginning, about 1883, and told from the “current” 1891, piecing together their whirlwind romance and subsequent parting, then unexpectedly meeting in a Waterloo station, surprising both of them.

Sherry delivers some seriously troubled characters a happy ending after their tumultuous story, fraught with not only political turmoil, but personal slights and tragedies. I cried a few times, unsurprisingly, but each part of the story is so well-written that I was hopeful even in the midst of it all.

reneethelibrarian's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

grace_astudentreading's review against another edition

adventurous emotional tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

This book was the perfect romance book for me! First of all, it was told in one of my favorite ways ever, with alternating timelines switching between Leighton and Catherine’s past in Chinese Turkestan and their present in England. I loved both timelines, though they were very different, and both characters. In the earlier period they are both more relaxed, more able to be their true selves so isolated away from the rest of the world. Catherine is utterly captivating, full of energy and at her peak as a martial artist. And Leighton is so caring and devoted to her. They are purer, younger, wilder version of themselves, and I loved them so much. Then in England they have both become so much harder people, but they are still so drawn to one another. Catherine who is still so deep in her grief and Leighton who is trying to move on. The angst and tension is absolutely delightful. Of course, there is also fantastic conflict outside of their relationship. I loved the fight scenes and the martial arts so much! Overall, I highly recommend this duology!

wonderreads's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

yourbookishbff's review

adventurous challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

This was a reread for me, and, again, a five-star reading experience. Sherry Thomas excels in using dual timeline/time slips to slowly reveal character backstory and heighten the suspense, and this dual timeline is particularly devastating. This story of two unlikely people brought together by circumstance is explicitly a fated romance, and with its lightly fantastical wuxia elements and chi-based magic, the world feels soft around the edges in a way that fits such a sweeping story of star-crossed spies and unearthly villains. This hits so many of my favorite beats - second-chance romance, hidden identity, on-page declarations of fidelity, and the list goes on (and on). I highly recommend reading both installments in this duology, and honestly they can be read in any order (The Hidden Blade is a prequel to this story and shows our two characters as they grow up and their paths begin to merge). Please note content warnings on this one - I have included additional detail for one potentially triggering scene.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Murder, Gun violence, Child death, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Pregnancy, Colonisation, and Sexual content

Minor: Infidelity

Child death: there is on-page infant death. It is alluded to from the very start of the book, so it is less a reveal and more a flashback of events. The baby's death is at the hands of our supernaturally powerful villain, and is not realistic or likely (as a parent, this made it far less triggering for me than death-while-sleeping, death due to an accident, death due to illness, etc.). It is tragic, but I personally feel that it is not gratuitously so. For some readers, though, this is understandably a topic they will avoid entirely, and I want to note it here for that reason!

bookish_you's review

adventurous emotional

5.0

xandrarama's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional sad tense

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Spywork, martial arts through a wuxia lens, revenge killings, betrayal, regret, reconciliation… This romantic adventure sweeping from the plains of nineteenth century Chinese Turkestan (now known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China) to the ballrooms of London is told via dual timelines and is a hugely satisfying resolution to everything that started in The Hidden Blade. Sherry Thomas is the master of delicious angst that never tips over into melodrama, and I bow down before her genius. 

jackiehorne's review against another edition

3.0

Not bad for an action-adventure romance, but the characters, and the romance arc, felt woefully underdeveloped in this book when compared to Thomas's outstanding earlier romances. No wonder—when you get to the "Author's Note" at book's end, you are informed that there's a prequel to the novel (mentioned nowhere on the book's cover), a prequel in which "the events of Ying-Ying's and Leighton's formative years that have made them what they are, events the repercussions of which are still very much felt in My Beautiful Enemy" are described. This prequel is an ebook. What, did Thomas deliver a novel that was too long, so the folks at Berkeley decided that they'd break it up into two and make more money? Was the publishing of one story in two volumes planned from the start, a way to get readers to pay both the $3.99 for the prequel AND the $7.99 for the main story, and/or to create more frequent "publishing events" for an author who writes more slowly, and thus keep her work more in the public eye (and on the charts at Amazon)?

No matter what the reason, I'm really feeling cranky about this. Thomas has been on my auto-buy list for a while now (with the exception of the prequel, which I somehow missed), but I'll be a far more wary consumer of her future books.

ltennant09's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

kimu23's review

3.5

Sherry Thomas have cracked the code for second chance romance. I always love the way she writes yearning and her romance almost always a hit for me. I hope one day she would write another historical romance with Asian heroine because I’m pretty sure this series is the only one she wrote with Asian lead.