Loved this a whole lot

What I loved most about this was it wasn't about Maria being trans, she just was. It wasn't about Jay being bi, he just was. What it was about was how grief in many forms can alter someone's expectations and how online and offline spaces are often so different. It felt really real to me and I enjoyed that a lot. Neither Maria not Jay were "perfect" and they struggled with imposter syndrome but they decided to try to grow together and that was enough.



Rep: Latinx trans woman MC, Thai american bisexual MC with a Muslim mother and Buddhist father. TW anxiety, panic disorder, grief, death of a sibling.

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Romance and Inclusion! Awesome!

Let me start by saying that I didn't know how Ms Milan was going to make these two get together. The start is so prickly and Jay is such an ass that I honestly think there is no coming back for him. Admittedly, I am biased towards Maria because I've met her in the previous book so Jay is already starting on the back foot, and he doesn't help himself at first. I think it might be his family that saves him, and of course, we get to hear his back story and that helps too. That said, he's not the star of this show.

I really enjoyed the building of the Cyclone universe and all the people connected to it. I loved the glimpses of Tina & Blake but my girl Maria is THE star! She reminds me of so many women I know - so strong, so resilient, and so afraid to show their soft side for so many reasons. And yes girl, we women can posses both a working brain and a working vagina! Having just left a job with a hyper-misogynistic boss, I so appreciated this novel right now.

On another note, thank you Ms Milan so much for writing with a different kind of lading lady. I read lots of romance and while I've read a pretty even mix of straight, gay, bi, and multiples, this is the first time I've read one with a trans leading lady. It did not disappoint.

Now, I'm not a trans woman so I can only speak from a straight black woman perspective. I'll leave the trans community to determine whether Ms Milan got it right or not. My joy was just at seeing some form of representation. Any recognition that not only straight people read romance novels should be commended.

More cyclone diversity please!

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Great if you are LGTB with a fetish for heels

Ok, this book tries to much at once and completely looses the regular listener in my opinion.

A really great idea about people getting to know each other online and in real life without knowing about it. Would be enough to carry a book without all the other problems packed into this one.

But there are simply too many problems packed into one book.

Bisexual character that acts straight through the story, so if feel he should be straight.

Transsexual character, I admit I should have know about from the first volume but I forgot and only caught up halfway throught the narration and them thought, what the hell is this in term of consistency, in the first volume there were problems that she was left home in the dorm because the other girls claimed she was not a girl and now nobody even notices? Weird. And I am sorry there should be some explainations for people who have no idea about the subject and how no talk about the operation or the medicamentation is necessary is too much for me. Or if it is not, same explanations at the end of the book for the uninitiated?

Subplot marriage with different faiths, Buddhism and Islam, really interesting but completely underdeveloped.

Subplot dealing with anxiety with therapy and medication, again there are already enough problems in the book, so that could have been left out.

Dealing with suicide, actually that was the sub plot I thought was reasonably well dealt with, but quite honestly made the book overloaded in my humble opinion.

Racial minorities. Actually this book made me feel sort of bad, because I would never look at somebody and think, might they be half chinese half thai, if at all they look asian to me. I sort of thought myself ok that I see people and might be interested where they come from, but this book had the weird concept of you should not see anybody any different while at the same time expecting you to know about every subgroup somebody might belong too. That honestly made my head spin.

And I have lived in Berkeley and can honestly say, there are non minority people to be found there too...

That leaves the final straw, heels. I know this hill in Berkeley and nobody would be dumb enough to walk up this hill in heels expecially nobody who can proof read physics slides without even studying physics (that said, I can understand how one might spot a missing sqared in r as oposed to r sqared, but spoting a differend of a constant like 2 pi, I am really not so sure).

Maybe I am just very unfond of heels, but I do think this book is overdoing it.

Ah and I forgot the workoholic that works all working hours but still has a wonderful body with muscles in all the right places.

The grating sould of one of the narrators doing a female voice did not help and the fact that the last quarter of the book was spend whinning by one of the characters did not help either.

Give me a break! (Not sure, why I did not give up on this one, but suffered through the whole).

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