I will admit when I first heard that this book was a thing, I was a bit of a hater about it. I went “It’s a vampyre and werewolf romance and the vampyre’s name is Misery … oh here we go.” Then I heard it had alpha/beta/omega tropes that I was familiar with from fanfiction and I maybe eye-rolled a bit. Because I was being judgey (to be clear I read fanfic, and I love a lot of fanfic, I just personally tend not to like fated mates/mating tropes in my fiction be it fan or otherwise, so I typically don’t read stories tagged with those things), and I am here to say: I loved this book. I have now recommended this book to one of my best friends. And I am sorry that I was 
being so judgey.
So plotwise the idea is that Misery (the daughter of a very powerful vamprye) is forced into a marriage with the Alpha werewolf of a pack to uphold the peace between species. But Misery has her motivations (outside of keeping the peace) for agreeing to the marriage. So you know, fake marriage to keep all-out interspecies war (it went badly last time) from happening. Then feelings happen between Misery and Lowe (the werewolf).
Set in a world that is basically ours, the vampyre’s and werewolves live (at least in the area of the world we are focused on) separately from each other and the humans. That said what we are shown of the various setups each species have, they live similarly to how people in today’s world live. With you know, some more casual nakedness (the weres) and blood drinking (the vampyre’s). There are hints of adaptations that have been made to accommodate the supernatural or at least forge some kind of peace with the supernatural (Misery was sent to live amongst the humans as collateral, with her continued existence dependent on the other vampyre’s good behaviour) and those were fascinating to me and I wanted more. The book isn’t so much about world-building but about Misery and Lowe, and dealing with the werewolf and vampyre politics, and even that is sort of secondary to the two of them bonding and “getting to know each other”. I did want to pause the action so to speak and take a better look around. I also wanted way more time with Misery’s twin brother.
As we are in Misery’s pov for most of the novel, and she has spent a lot of time away from the other vampyre’s (first as collateral to the humans, then married into the were’s pack) we don’t get that much about vampyre life. We get some snippets and some acknowledgement from Lowe that there are other places where humans and the other species mix more. While Misery learns more about were life, we also don’t get into a deep dive into that either. This is a story about people’s feelings, and personal desires more so than about world-building. Which is fine! Because the characters are sarcastic and full of banter and just fun.
There are some relatively high stakes, both for the future of vampyre and were and human relations, and the personal stakes get very high for the characters as well. Nothing ever really seems in doubt though, I could see early on where this story was going, but I wasn’t mad about it. The writing was quippy and fun, and I wanted to spend more time with the characters.
I have been on a romance reading journey since the fall of last year, figuring out what I like in the genre and what I don’t. I spent a lot of my teen years reading paranormal romances but leaned more towards the ones that had adventures along with the romance. This book was a little more heavy on the romance. It had characters who happened to be supernatural with some of their getting-together obstacles being the long-standing grudge between races, and that was different than what I read when I was younger but – it was also funny. Like really funny to me.
So I have established (so far) what I like in romance books, is adventure and banter and if there are vampyres and werewolves all the better. We’ve also established that I really need to be less judgy. (All that said, this is a me thing but it being spelled vampyre is driving me a bit nuts as I type this review as I want to default to spelling it ‘vampire’, as does my spell check.)
