This is a spoiler-free review!
Well.... I do not even know what to say. For one, I honestly do not even know how I missed the fact that they work in an amusement park that is basically Disneyland, and I immediately got the ick. Listen, I knew there was a castle on the cover, but I thought it was more in the sense of a billionaire's castle mansion, not a Cinderella castle situation. It was giving major Disney adult vibes and I felt as though I was being held captive, I needed to be free of this torment. There are so many pop culture and popular restaurant references, it was incredibly distracting and read like a 13-year-old on Wattpad instead of a published work.
Zahra is pretty funny every now and again, and she was eating Rowan up at every chance she got, which I have to respect. Rowan on the other hand, is the definition of a handsome loner with no social skills that do not directly benefit him. He needed to be knocked down a few pegs, and Zahra was happy to take on that task. I kind of really could not stand him throughout the entire book, which is not a good look when this is supposed to be the heartthrob male lead that had half the internet drooling over him.
I really thought this was going to take a turn into a contract marriage trope, and since it is a fan favorite in my book, I was excited for the plot to move forward and bring in some substance, but unfortunately I was left underwhelmed and disappointed when this never came up. There was even a perfect opportunity for it, given the terms of being the director of Dreamland for Rowan, and yet it was fumbled. Rowan constantly compares himself to Mr. Darcy, which is absolute insanity given that Rowan has the charisma of a dried out leaf on the ground.
These employees do literally nothing all day long. Every chapter where they are at the office or working on a presentation, it is essentially bare minimum effort and constant mentions of late nights with no work to show for it. Someone truly needs to unionize this amusement park because their working conditions are insane and surely not up to code, not to mention the horrendous pay and abismal healthcare the employees receive. Rowan seems completely fine with this information and it just takes one employee - Zahra - to shed light on the situation and make Rowan realize that maybe he should treat his employees like human beings. He was giving off major capitalist pig vibes, because why in the world was he bragging about having the idea to lay off ten thousand employees when the park was losing money??
I was not invested in Zahra and Rowan's relationship at all - I thought that maybe once we hit the halfway mark in the story, that something would evolve and their relationship would actually form into something with substance, but it fell flat and left me wishing I did not commit this much time to their story. The smut was not smutting at all... everyone was raving over this book for years, and it was giving Wattpad-level descriptions. They trauma dumped on each other and then immediately jumped each other's bones, and it was the weirdest transition I have ever read, and honestly started the domino effect that made me not like either of them by the end of the book.
All I can say is thank god that this series is compiled of interconnected stand alones and does not continue following Rowan and Zahra, because if I had to read another two books about this pairing, I would start to believe that love does not exist. Rowan did not apologize nearly enough for the things that he did and the lies that he told, and I truly cannot believe this is the man everyone has been thirsting after for the past two years. I felt as though I was being punk'd the entire book, and I am just grateful I borrowed this from the library and did not spend my actual money on nearly five hundred pages of a lack-luster romance.
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