Romantasy Melody
The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley – Book Review
Oct 28
4 min read
0
5
Book Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Series: Dearly Beloathed (Book 1)
Genre: Adult Fantasy Romance
Spice: Hot
Summary:
In an alternate version of England, those with magic are separated into Orders based on their magical strengths such as healing, defense, engineering, and even murder. Osric Mourdaunt is one of those magical assassins, part of the Fyren order that thrive on physical prowess and stealth magic. Osric has a big problem; he’s losing access to his dark magic, and no one in his order can know. He comes to find that his condition can only be healed by one of the preeminent healers in the land, Aurienne Fairhrim. She unfortunately belongs to an enemy Order, one on the side of moral good, and would never stoop so low as to heal a Fyren assassin, as she fearlessly tells him after he threatens to kidnap her.
But there is a pandemic running amok across the land, making poor children life-threateningly sick, and when Osric offers to anonymously donate money to Aurienne’s Haelyn Order to fund an immunization program, Aurienne is forced to try healing him. As if healing a murderous Fyren wasn’t bad enough, his condition is scientifically incurable, and Aurienne is forced to abandon her logic and reason in favor of chasing local myths of miraculous healings. As the two enemies are forced to work together in secret, they’ll have to put up with each other long enough to save Osric, help the children, and try not to give in to their mutual attractions.
Reaction:
The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy is a whip smart and clever slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance where the two love interests truly do start out as hated enemies. From the dry, cutting banter to the unique writing style, and the SAT vocabulary, clever is the best description for it.
If you live for that mental dance as each character tries to one up the insult of the other, then you’ll adore this book. I am not one of those people. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good banter between love interests and definitely enjoyed parts of the banter in this book, but I felt like overall the banter was so erudite that it was missing a soul that I prize over cleverness. Because of this disconnect, the romance didn’t grab me like it does in my favorite books.
The banter was also the focus of the narrative over plot, action, and world-building. It read like a movie script at times, with entire pages of just dialogue. Action sequences were heavily abbreviated, and I thought while some aspects of the world were well built, there were others that were just glanced over, leaving me with a lot of questions. For example, I did enjoy the scientific approach to magic and how it operates in concert with the body, but there were entire Orders that were barely mentioned in the story, so I didn’t get to know all the different types of magic.
The writing style is rather unique as far as fantasy romances go. I thought it added to the narrative when the author emphasized passages by capitalizing phrases that shouldn’t be and having short asides to convey attitudes and emotions. The book is also filled with long words that not everyone knows. The pro of these vocab words is that it lends itself to the scientific, smart vibe the book has going for it. The con is that it makes some passages hard to read. Overall, I can appreciate the style, even if it makes the reading a little bit harder.
I do think one thing the author excelled at (aside from the clever banter) was the clearly defined characters. Each one felt like it had a unique way of speaking and phrasing as I read it so that there was no confusing who was who. And Osric and Aurienne specifically were very defined characters with clear motivations and feelings, while still being interesting and complex.
Overall, this book was just okay for me. I was really missing the adrenaline from action sequences and felt like I just didn’t empathize with the romance that much. It also left me with too many questions about the setting and plot. I can see why some people would really like this book though, because the atmosphere and vibes created by the writing style and banter are ultimately entertaining.
What I enjoyed:
· The central conflict that a righteous healer must help an extremely morally gray assassin to help immunize children is pretty unique, and I enjoyed how that rolled into other conflicts in the story.
· The character voices and attitudes were so vivid and entertaining. Even a lot of the supporting characters were so clear in my mind while I was reading.
· There were some quirks of both Osric and Aurienne’s personalities that I found adorable, such as Osric collecting stray animals and naming them after the illegal act he was committing when he found them.
What I didn't enjoy:
· The lack of action. In this book, action was used to display Osric’s personality rather than induce adrenaline in the reader or even further the plot, so it was very minimalized overall.
· I wish the wider conflict introduced towards the end of the book had been introduced earlier. It was a smart twist, but it just took too long to develop. I felt like the book would have been more exciting if it had been introduced earlier.
