ePistols at Dawn by Z.A. Maxfield - blurrypetals review
originally posted jul. 15, 2020 - ★☆☆☆☆
Out of the 2.6 million romance novels I read in 2018, one of the ones that stood out as "Hey, that's pretty good!" was Z.A. Maxfield's novel, The Long Way Home which, despite having kind of a silly premise, ended up being a really sweet read with a nice slow burn romance that I really enjoyed. So, when I saw J.F. Harding (who narrated The Long Way Home and did a really nice job with it) had also narrated this Z.A. Maxfield book, I figured it would be a nice book to tuck away for a time like this, where I feel myself slipping into a bit of a reading slump. Instead, this book ended up being really lame, poorly paced schlock that did the opposite of pulling me out of a reading slump, instead making me feel tired and aggravated. The two leads were both really unpleasant and their inner voices didn't feel very distinguished from one another, a problem I didn't think I had to worry about with Maxfield, who did an excellent job in this respect in The Long Way Home. The last time I was this confused about the two male leads was when I tortured myself by suffering through Cut & Run and Sticks & Stones by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux last year, and that is an experience where I would sooner rather drink bleach rather than repeat. I realize this is a dramatic statement and it doesn't exactly apply to ePistols At Dawn but it really felt like I was repeating that experience and it honestly was causing me mental pain. This was a DNF with a little less than 2 hours of the audiobook left to go, and, even though there wasn't much left, I absolutely couldn't force myself to get through the rest of it. Besides being almost the same person (seriously, it took me way too long to figure that Jae was the one with the braid, not Kelly) the leads had a seriously sickening case of insta-love which, on its own is not always a death-sentence for me, but paired with zero chemistry and a flimsy plot, it made the idea of finishing this book utterly unbearable. I try to rate books I don't finish 2/5 because there is always that slim chance that I might be missing out on something and I might be needlessly dragging it down, but this was one of those exceptions where I couldn't imagine anything getting better at all. The leads were flat, the plot was awful, the chemistry was nonexistent, and this book chipped away at my will to live. It is not the first book to do so, as The Fever King by Victoria Lee, Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer, More Than This by Patrick Ness and More Than This by Jay McLean are definitely much more painful experiences than this, but there you have it!
