Book: Blackwood
Reviewed by Anonymous
Rating: 4/5
I really, really loved this book. And somehow I also spent a significant portion of it thinking, woof, this is a lot.
The A/B/O worldbuilding was one of my favorite things about it. It actually took the time to explore the dynamics in a way that felt deeply developed rather than just using A/B/O as a collection of familiar tropes. I also loved the Australian setting and how much I got to learn about the world around these characters.
And Coll? Amazing. He was not at all what I expected going into this book, but by the time I understood him, I couldn't imagine him being any other way. The relationship was slow, frustratingly slow at times, but it was the kind of slow that kept me reading because I genuinely wanted to see where it was going.
My biggest problem was simply that there was too much of everything. The book had so much worldbuilding, backstory, character development, and side characters that I kept wishing some of that material had been spread across multiple books. There were enough fully developed side characters here that I would have happily followed them into their own stories, and I think that would have allowed the world to unfold without putting quite so much into one book.
And unfortunately, the length did matter. I loved this book enough to finish it, but not enough to sign myself up for the next book in the series.