Welp, this is Reylo fanfic, so inevitably it meets that most basic benchmark level of ‘acceptable’, but I must say I have never been so bored by a 500 year old wizard in my life.

Ali Hazelwood has two cover quotes (bravo for Berkley knowing their audience) and both of them are bullshit:

As is usually the case in contemporary romances, they aren’t “enemies”. There was at least one occasion when Reggie directly informs the reader that she and Ben are “supposed to be enemies” and it jolted me out of the story because I never felt it was so. As usual, all of their “enmity” was caused by misunderstandings and miscommunications, the effect of which are diluted even further by the fact that Ben has his own POV chapters, to ensure that readers with weak constitutions know that he would never harm Reggie and she is never in even the slightest bit of actual danger with him. 

Their “love” is as superficial and unearned as their “enmity” - notably, the book’s indulgence in typical obnoxious sex-positive millennial feminism devolves into a total farce at the post-makeover “ballroom” scene (you know the trope) when, without a shred of self-awareness, Reggie exposits her disgust at all the (physically) old men being escorted by beautiful submissive young women - but of course, her 500 year old boyfriend is the perfect man. Since she knows nothing about the personalities of these men other than vague rumours about The Patriarchy (and keeping in mind that she was previously told that Ben himself was a Bad Man who had done Bad Things, but he turned out to be just misunderstood after all) the only reasonable conclusion one can draw is that Ben is a better boyfriend than all these other old wizards because, despite being centuries her senior, he’s still hot. 

The sex scenes were boring and mechanical and totally unnecessary for the plot and character development, and one of them was the most laughably random and unexpected sex scene in any of these romcoms I’ve read so far

where Reggie and Ben give each other hand jobs while they are trapped in a well,

in a sort of bizarre parody of Rey’s (mostly scrapped) sexual awakening in the yonic mirror-cave in TLJ. 

The worldbuilding (such as it is) in this book is awful, even by typical fantasy-romance standards. Witches and warlocks perform spells by praying to the ancient Roman gods, and inscribing curses on tablets. Great! What about the gods of every other culture that ever existed on Earth? Who knows? No other cultures are ever even mentioned. 

Generally it has that very superficial and totally unresearched style I have come to expect from this genre, which is evident from the minor details which should make the reader feel immersed in the world and familiar with the characters. Ben wears a “favourite designer suit”, as if that tells us anything at all about him. Which designer? Cut? Colour? Reggie also describes the suit as looking uncomfortable, which betrays a total lack of understanding about the history of menswear on the part of the author. 

Reggie has not one, but two Special Protagonist Traits that makes her unlike the other girls - the first is that she has OCD (which is treated as an adorable quirk and given no serious concern whatsoever), and the second is that she plays legally-distinct Magic: The Gathering. This is pretty cool and relatable (as opposed to the Special Protagonist Trait in the last book I read - Forget Me Not by Julie Soto - where the main character effortlessly maintains a rockin’ bod despite being troublingly addicted to donuts). I’m willing to believe that Clare has some level of real-life experience with the game, and it had a lot of potential to be used as a vehicle for literary techniques to enhance the story - for example, by depicting Reggie and Ben as metaphorical enemy duelists in the context of the game, due to their competitive natures. Unfortunately Spellcraft: the Magicking is another element of the book which is terminally underdeveloped. Reggie’s ace card is the Brilliant Sun-Phoenix (sun symbolism, divine light, rebirth, you know the drill) but we don’t even see her win a game with it! 

The utter lack of curiosity in both this main character and this author is astounding. It baffles me that Clare has enough of an academic bent to research ancient Roman curse magic for fun, and yet somehow this is the most interesting way she could come up with to incorporate that into a novel. If I actually became friends/lovers with a 500 year old person, I would need to hear all of the stories. I would never stop asking questions about the history of magic and the history of the world, but Reggie never asks or wonders about anything, and the age difference is only ever really "explored“ (in the most superficial sense of the term) in relation to the question of whether Ben thinks Reggie is too young for him, which itself is mostly treated as a question of pure numbers rather than lived emotional experience. Possibly this is because Ben seems to have had vanishingly few memorable or emotional experiences during all that time. He has exactly two significant sources of trauma - one being his neglectful parents (of course),

whom he murdered himself,

a fact which is dropped on the reader in the most ridiculous manner and moment, and the other being a far less detailed and compelling version of Lipwig’s realisation in Going Postal (that ”victimless“ scams against greedy capitalist exploiters still lead to consequences that destroy the lives of good people trapped in the capitalist system).

As mediocre as this first book was, it can probably only go up from here, and the sequel is GingeRose fic - the most criminally underrated ship in all of Star Wars - so maybe this will turn out to have been worth it after all.