Book: Phantasma by Kaylie Smith
Reviewed by Scarlet
Rating: 4/5
The book starts with the two sisters, Ophelia and Genevieve, watching their mothers dead body to go do the tradition they do with every woman in their family to give on the magic to the next daughter with a locked. A day after they find out their mother had debts that needed to be paid or they would loose their house. But 1 of the sisters already knew and they get into a big fight which ends up in Genevieve missing. Ophelia finds out genevieve had entered Phantasma, a game of the dead with just two rules, stay alive and dont fall in love. So to safe her sister Ophelia had entered too. In the games she then meets a charming, arrogant and infurriatingly attractive Blackwell who claims to be able to help her through the trials and slowly Ophelia does the very thing the whole games warned her not to!
Honestly, i was pretty irritated with Ophelia. She came into the games to safe her sister and clearly knew the rules but slowly lost herself into a demon while being warned multiple times not to🫢 outside that she didn't even try to find out by herself, what was going on while the trials was on unless Blackwell came to rescue! But i did like Blackwell! I thought it was adorable how he wanted to help her as much as he did. But in the end pfoehh, i know now why but i won't spoil because you have to find out yourself😉
The plot was pretty good in my opinion and especially the twist at the end i didn't see that really coming until the last two chapters while i normally know the ends quite quick!
And ofcourse there was a lot of romance but it didn't over do so it didn't push the storyline to the background which i appreciated a lot! And there was spice, was there a lot? No there wasn't and i didn't mind that at all! I am not really a spice reader and to see there wasn't that much and the spice came on the perfect timings i was happily surprised!
So overall writing wise the storyline was pretty good, world building was really nice too and characters were okay! I do recommend if you like heavily deadly trials, demons that try to seduce to get a bargain.
but please do read the trigger warnings before you start because they are pretty heavy!