Poison or Protect: A Delightfully Deadly Novella (Unabridged‪)‬

It might be a failing of mine, but I’m not one to be super interested in investigating into the backstory of characters I’m not fond of - even if I do agree with the “every villain is the hero of their own story” idea. So after reading The Finishing School series, I wasn’t super excited to dive into Preshea’s book. HOWEVER, it was so good and heart warming and soft?? I adored the whole thing. They were perfect for each other.

All in all, I liked the narrator. She did accents and voices well enough to differentiate characters and keep me engaged with the story. She didn’t do anything so weird or odd that I’d get mentally kicked out of the story. There were two things that kind of got to me, though.
1) She had a very clipped way of speaking and each phrase was spoken with such finality that I’d frequently think she’d reached the end of a sentence before she had. Normally that would really irk me, but I was able to mentally give it a pass because Preshea has always been described as having a severely clipped way of speaking, so I gave this the benefit of the doubt that it was a deliberate choice.
2) She also did this thing where she added an echo effect to lines of character’s internal dialogue that would normally be denoted by italics in text. At first I thought it was a clever way to differentiate internal dialogue from plain narrative, but it started grating on my nerves after a while.
It’s only a novella though, so it neither of those thing got to the point where they ruined my enjoyment of the book. YMMV. If they would bug you a ton, I’d recommend trying the book in a different medium before giving it a pass. I promise it’s worth the extra effort.

Gail does it again with this latest installment in this series!!!! Thank you