A review by lezreadalot
Dangerous Game by Bel Blackwood

3.0

“Nope, tough luck. In our world, it’s love or nothing.”

Very cute, very fun, but just a bit lacking for me? For some reason, it's really hard for me to turn my brain off when it comes to fiction about the mafia. Not that I'm super knowledgeable about it, but several things always jump out at me as being super unbelievable, and it's hard to ignore those things and just enjoy it? But this was a good time, with a really cute premise. A mild mannered day-care teacher tries to get revenge on the woman her girlfriend cheated with, only to discover that she's a powerful mob boss. And she eventually gets wrangled into working for her. This is a book that could have worked so well as an audiobook. Wren has a lot of personality and a very distinctive voice that is really present in the prose, and it just felt like a book that should be performed. (Also, weird nitpick, but I hate seeing '?!' being used so often; it's so silly to me? Every time I read it I cringed a little. I know I know, one day I'll suffocate under the weight of all my stupid reading nitpicks.) Some of the plot things just didn't make sense to me. I think the author did a good job of establishing Katya as an intelligent capable leader, but then sometimes she'd make decisions that had me like 'girl what'. There were so many little things that just brought me right out of the story.

But Wren and Katya were great together. The chemistry that was established in those early chapters never fizzled. Katya's a perfect dream, and I was scared that the plot would go in a certain direction with her, but thankfully it didn't. The side plot with the kids was cute. They acted like actual kids, and all of the characters' reactions to them were realistic as well. Wren's way of relating to them and getting them to behave when they were being little hellions rang pretty true to me. The mystery wasn't GREAT but it was serviceable, and I liked the action at the end.

Kudos, overall. Definitely could have used a closer edit for types and inconsistencies, but I mostly had a good time.