Parents' Guide to Reckless: Powerless, Book 2

There are so many great fantasy romances where the main characters despise each other, and because of a flimsy and forgettable story, this isn't one of them. Very little happens. Kai goes to retrieve Paeyton across the desert, they fight a lot, kiss some, fight again, and turn toward home. In between chapters about Paeyton and Kai finding increasingly more transparent ways to steal a kiss before they kill each other, Kitt gets his own chapters where he mostly sits in his office and throws food out the window because he's mourning his evil father too much to eat. What's going on in the kingdom after the Hunger Games-like trials from the first book? What's really going on with what's left of the Resistance? Anything at all? Paedyn and Kai even pass by the sacred resting place of the first queen of Iyla in the wastelands and don't stop in. At least take a peek, you've come all this way, and the story needs some depth.

There are smaller issues with Reckless, too, that many readers will not be able to get over. Like, it's hard to fathom having any kind of stolen romantic moment covered in sewage -- okay, it's mostly the water that's washing out the sewage tunnel, but come on. Still disgusting. And how can a person purging so much blood from an arrow wrap themselves in a few strips of cloth, march on in the desert for hours, and roll around on that same gaping wound of a shoulder in a field of flowers? Why aren't editors asking these questions of their new writer before publication? This series had potential and should have been better. For better love-hate fantasies, start with Dance of Thieves by Mary A. Pearson. There's even an eerily similar scenario of a couple chained together in the desert -- but it's done right.