REWARD OFFERED: Apprentice to The Villain wanted for treason (light), magical property damage (alleged), and one incident involving a weaponized scone (accurate). Frequently seen with a grumpy frog (crowned, judgmental). Answers to “Evie” or “Stop that.”
Evie Sage didn’t mean to become the right-hand woman to the kingdom’s most terrifying villain. One minute, she was applying for an entry-level position that promised “light paperwork and occasional beheadings,” and the next, she was knee-deep in magical mayhem, murder plots, and an entirely inappropriate crush on her brooding, sharp-jawed, walking disaster of a boss.
Now, with a magical prophecy unraveling, assassins showing up in the break room, and a suspicious amount of frogs wearing crowns, Evie has to figure out how to survive her job without setting the kingdom on fire―or her dignity, which is hanging by a very sarcastic thread.
Being evil-adjacent was never part of the five-year plan. But then again…neither was falling for The Villain.
How many books does it take to make a quirky character too quirky and the cringey dialogues too cringey? The answer is three...
Everything I found charming in book one, relatively fun in book two, turned into torture by book three. Evie can literally never be serious and in each scene she's in she has to be so over the top and make it all about her. I'm sorry but I couldn't take it anymore. Not to mention the girl literally stucks her tongue out a million times during the book as a reaction to basically everything...
It's not "quirky", it's deranged....
Then there's the side characters. On one hand, I definitely wanted to read more about them than Evie and Trystan, but on the other hand, the constant switching between POVs was tiring. I think fewer POVs would be better and we still could've learned everything we needed to about everyone else.
The will-they-won't-they was excessive because we all know they will. The slow burn was too slow and I feel like they had the same conversations over and over again. Someone said in their review that this could've been a trilogy and I wholeheartedly agree - there are too many pages filled with banter the author obviously thought would be funny but most of the time it wasn't.
I did enjoy reading about Kingsley, Blade and Becky, so there's that. The ending cliffhanger wasn't as surprising because the titles of the book are progressively going toward it 😂. I don't know if I'll read the 4th book because I was severely disappointed in this one. It took me ages to finish it and when I saw it only had about 330 pages, I was shocked. It felt far longer...
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