Between the Lines: A Realmwalker Novel

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

When I came across this book I thought the premise of the story was super interesting: A fantasy story focused on moving between different realms/realities. That sounds super fun! Sadly, besides the initially interesting sounding plot (and the promise of queer romance) the book falls flat in pretty much everything it tries to do.  

- The romance was rushed and underdeveloped, there was just no chemistry between the leads. They meet, they fall in love in 30 pages? and that's it. 
- The story is frankly inexistent. Having read the entire book I still can't say what was the plot. The author failed in coming up with a plot and whatever plot there “was” failed to instill any kind of sense of urgency or danger. I couldn't tell you what was so bad about the thing that the characters were worried about because nothing happened previously either to make us worry or to signify change or an advancing status. 
- The narration is super repetitive, filled with telling instead of showing and filled with phrases like “nothing would be the same again”, “things were about to change”, etc. Not lying, every chapter has like five or ten of this phrases. It gets tyring really fast. 
- New characters that serve no purpose appear from nothing all the time? I don't need you to bring a new named character just so they can ask a random question and never appear again.
- Some characters kept certain events secret but sometimes other characters would pop up and talk about the secret without on page explanation of why they know about the secret or when were they told about it. And this happened more than once.
- Whenever the character is supposed to practice his powers the only practice was
“You have to do this” 
character does it first try, without sweating. One line of description
“Good, you did excellent, keep practicing”

I could seriously go on and on but I'm gonna stop here. 
The book doesn't even feel like a first draft, more like a fanfiction. It needs a LOT of editing. Worse, it demands the author sits and takes more time to plot the book, the plot, the relationship between the characters, the mysteries. Everything.