A review by talkflowers2me
On the Care and Keeping of Orcs by Kass O'Shire

3.0

I wanted to like this more than I actually did. It had a lot of things I love: single mom finding herself after losing her identity to motherhood, childhood friends to lovers, big gentle orc. Unfortunately, all the pieces didn’t come together in the best way. While I liked Torsten’s backstory and his general sweet/teasing demeanor, the sex stuff really didn’t do it for me, and that was basically all the character we got from him was. He talked so much during sex. Like, yikes. It felt like it was trying to hard to be hot and dirty and it felt cringey. I wished there had been more chemistry between them. I was just kind of bored. The road trip plot felt uninspired, and kind of confusing. The whole inn scene where she unknowingly dresses provocatively and gets harassed in the tavern? There was no point for that except to lead into alley sex between the two MCs. It felt like the author had specific sex stuff she wanted to write, and loosely tried connecting them with plot that didn’t really make sense. I also didn’t get the footnotes thing, and I ended up skipping them all after about a quarter of the way through the story. The world building in general was confusing and I skimmed over most of it because it didn’t feel worth it to try figuring out