A review by jackiehorne
My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

3.0

Not bad for an action-adventure romance, but the characters, and the romance arc, felt woefully underdeveloped in this book when compared to Thomas's outstanding earlier romances. No wonder—when you get to the "Author's Note" at book's end, you are informed that there's a prequel to the novel (mentioned nowhere on the book's cover), a prequel in which "the events of Ying-Ying's and Leighton's formative years that have made them what they are, events the repercussions of which are still very much felt in My Beautiful Enemy" are described. This prequel is an ebook. What, did Thomas deliver a novel that was too long, so the folks at Berkeley decided that they'd break it up into two and make more money? Was the publishing of one story in two volumes planned from the start, a way to get readers to pay both the $3.99 for the prequel AND the $7.99 for the main story, and/or to create more frequent "publishing events" for an author who writes more slowly, and thus keep her work more in the public eye (and on the charts at Amazon)?

No matter what the reason, I'm really feeling cranky about this. Thomas has been on my auto-buy list for a while now (with the exception of the prequel, which I somehow missed), but I'll be a far more wary consumer of her future books.