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A review by gorgonine
Bitter Spirits by Jenn Bennett
3.0
05 Feb 2022
1. This review is late by 2 months so everything is based off of half-remembered feelings and my chaotic collection of booknotes and highlights. So take it with a grain of salt.
2. Medium is hired to help get rid of curse on big-time businessman. She does that, and the two of them begin to flirt and fall in love (urgh) while they try to get to the bottom of who actually did the cursing.
3. There are a ton of things I appreciated about this book. The prose is reasonable- which for me means that it doesn't try to be poetic and conveys emotions fairly well. It's also pretty fast, zipping along at a good pace and populated with enough interesting character to make the ride fun. The worldbuilding is also pretty good; I particularly appreciated how the author didn't think 1920s and leap immediately to "oh so everyone is white then." The far east immigrant flavor the whole book had definitely livened things up a bit, and I never felt it was being used as a prop since we had such a variety of East/SouthEast Asian characters. Two months on, it's one of things I remember fondly about the story.
4. What I didn't like was the romance. It's just so maddeningly heterosexual. And I don't mean that in the "there aren't enough gays" kinda way but in the "everything is a such a fucking cliche I'm going to find a pillow and scream into it till i feel better" kinda way. There are like, the seeds of a sweet romance in the story and it comes out occasionally, but the for the most part it's just horny. It's so horny. The two protagonists cannot stand in the same room without immediately wanting to enact an R-Rated scene. They start being horny the first time they meet each other (which, okay- fair enough I understand that is sometimes how horny works) and then spend every other scene where they are near each other being hornier. Stop. Please. I get it. They want to fuck. I got it ten pages ago and now I'm not sure if I'll ever not get it. STOP.
5. And yes, I see those people (very validly) going "you pick up a romance and you expect it to not be horny?" and while that is valid I'd like to note that there are different ways of denoting horniness in writing and Bitter Spirits just uses the most goddamned meaningless cliche nonsense for it. It's mostly a lot of generic adjectives. Once in a while Winter gets really horny about Aida's innumerable freckles and I actually liked those bits because at least the freckles were a genuinely Aida thing. (I support your kinks, sir.) But then there are the really random sex scenes and Aida getting angry because Aiden once slept with some woman like years before she met him and he didn't bother to tell her about it and no. Absolutely NOT. I will not support a romance where people are not allowed their privacy. Jeez.
6. Also, some of the other reviews talk about sex scenes which are objectively hilarious (derogatory) but I skipped every one of those (the non sex horniness was already more than I could take) so no comments there.
7. The thing is, it was not a bad book. Like at all. The world was well-drawn, the characters were fun, the antagonist was kinda predictable but not in a bad way (look, you read enough mysteries, you IMMEDIATELY peg the unassuming helpful guy somewhere in the first act as a suspect), there were some actual sweet moments in the romance, Winter's family and friends were wonderful, and so was Aida's found family. It's a sweet, well-constructed book that was jut too horny for its own good.
1. This review is late by 2 months so everything is based off of half-remembered feelings and my chaotic collection of booknotes and highlights. So take it with a grain of salt.
2. Medium is hired to help get rid of curse on big-time businessman. She does that, and the two of them begin to flirt and fall in love (urgh) while they try to get to the bottom of who actually did the cursing.
3. There are a ton of things I appreciated about this book. The prose is reasonable- which for me means that it doesn't try to be poetic and conveys emotions fairly well. It's also pretty fast, zipping along at a good pace and populated with enough interesting character to make the ride fun. The worldbuilding is also pretty good; I particularly appreciated how the author didn't think 1920s and leap immediately to "oh so everyone is white then." The far east immigrant flavor the whole book had definitely livened things up a bit, and I never felt it was being used as a prop since we had such a variety of East/SouthEast Asian characters. Two months on, it's one of things I remember fondly about the story.
4. What I didn't like was the romance. It's just so maddeningly heterosexual. And I don't mean that in the "there aren't enough gays" kinda way but in the "everything is a such a fucking cliche I'm going to find a pillow and scream into it till i feel better" kinda way. There are like, the seeds of a sweet romance in the story and it comes out occasionally, but the for the most part it's just horny. It's so horny. The two protagonists cannot stand in the same room without immediately wanting to enact an R-Rated scene. They start being horny the first time they meet each other (which, okay- fair enough I understand that is sometimes how horny works) and then spend every other scene where they are near each other being hornier. Stop. Please. I get it. They want to fuck. I got it ten pages ago and now I'm not sure if I'll ever not get it. STOP.
5. And yes, I see those people (very validly) going "you pick up a romance and you expect it to not be horny?" and while that is valid I'd like to note that there are different ways of denoting horniness in writing and Bitter Spirits just uses the most goddamned meaningless cliche nonsense for it. It's mostly a lot of generic adjectives. Once in a while Winter gets really horny about Aida's innumerable freckles and I actually liked those bits because at least the freckles were a genuinely Aida thing. (I support your kinks, sir.) But then there are the really random sex scenes and Aida getting angry because Aiden once slept with some woman like years before she met him and he didn't bother to tell her about it and no. Absolutely NOT. I will not support a romance where people are not allowed their privacy. Jeez.
6. Also, some of the other reviews talk about sex scenes which are objectively hilarious (derogatory) but I skipped every one of those (the non sex horniness was already more than I could take) so no comments there.
7. The thing is, it was not a bad book. Like at all. The world was well-drawn, the characters were fun, the antagonist was kinda predictable but not in a bad way (look, you read enough mysteries, you IMMEDIATELY peg the unassuming helpful guy somewhere in the first act as a suspect), there were some actual sweet moments in the romance, Winter's family and friends were wonderful, and so was Aida's found family. It's a sweet, well-constructed book that was jut too horny for its own good.