Lore & Lust

Loved this so much.

The actual book is a 3-star read for me but the Russian translation is awful. Never in my life have I read something that terrible. I have no idea HOW it was published like this. Google translate would have done a better job than the one who translated this book. It's not readable. At some point, I had to look for the original, because I did not understand anything. And if in the first chapters there was still some hint of meaning and logic in the construction of sentences and phrases, then in the end it was a set of words that even in Russian does not make sense.
But this book had not only a translator. A whole staff of workers stood behind it: editors, proofreaders, etc. But they did not even correct banal errors (for example, they left TWO VARIANTS of the translation of the same phrase in the text, which the translator forgot to remove from the final draft). How could this happen? Why don't people do their job?

This book was a surprise. I stumbled upon it on Amazon looking for new releases - I've always been a fan of vampires and there's so few good m/m paranormal romances that I was willing to give it a chance blind, and I'm so glad I did!
As the description says, this is a pretty slow burn but doesn't feel stagnant or boring at all. Nikole has built a very vivid alternate world that includes different cultures and settings in under 300 pages which is very impressive. I've read entire multi-book series that didn't seem as well thought out and organized. Haruka's characterisation can feel a bit odd, but if you take into account his age and personality it doesn't feel unrealistic or overly awkward.
It'll be interesting to see more background information in the second book, The Vanishing.