alyssa's Reviews > Show Me Wonders

“You’re my reason.”

ah yes, the feeling of Riley Nash earthbending the feels straight into my soul through violent, bodily means 😌

[4.6] kid you not when i say my hands refused to part with my kindle for a single second once the ARC showed up in my library.

i spent the last few hours interacting with the world solely through my peripheral vision. cooking? i offer my sincerest apologies to the poor burnt, unsalted eggs that i cooked only for sustenance. exercise? my eyes got a workout of their own as they spun in circles trying to keep track of the words onscreen as i model strut on the treadmill. restroom? did it all singlehandedly baby. that’s how invested in this story i was.

the meager snippets we got in the previous book could never have prepared me for what i was walking into with Oliver (Ollie) Shaw and Jackson (Jax) Moreno’s multi-chance love story spanning years of hellos, goodbyes, and i love you’s. i can’t think of a more explosive way to start off their story than what the author did here: a combination of “love is blind” and “survivor” taken to train tunnel collapse levels of extreme that had me on tenterhooks.

i don’t want to reveal too much, but the hole Jax could never quite escape tore my heart to shreds and brought anxiety clawing at my throat. like sitting next to a ticking bomb sans countdown display so you drive yourself crazy in the endless loop of speculation. Jax deserves the world and more - not only for his innate understanding of Ollie’s needs in terms of his mental health, but also his resilience and strength in the face of so much mistreatment and violence throughout his life. knowing what i know now, let’s just say if i locked eyes with him on the street, i’d be folding at his feet like fresh laundry.

Ollie’s relationship with his agoraphobia, of feeling like a failure for being unable to accomplish the bare minimum that a normal person does without a hitch, is one i think anyone with anxiety can relate to deeply in their own way. but Ollie’s more than that - he’s his staunch dedication to his adorable reptile-loving daughter, his creative storytelling, his knitting skills, his love of gardening. even at his lowest, he continues to be the singular source of sunshine that Jax can’t turn away from.

some plot points were at times 狗血 (i can’t think of the word in english lmao, maybe “a flair for the dramatique”?), they certainly could’ve done with more lube on the whole lol, and i would’ve liked the sex to have been held out of reach for a little while longer (then again, my demisexual self has never found herself in such a precarious situation before so who knows 🤣), yet everything still managed to tie together in the best of ways. i genuinely don’t know how Riley Nash has pulled off this Febreze freshness with every story so far in the series, but color me impressed. each installment has offered something fundamentally unique and entertaining, and i couldn’t recommend this author’s work enough.

don’t mind me lurking in the corner for more info on those future books dropped at the end there 👀

Thank you to GRR and the publisher for providing an advanced copy of the book. This is my honest review :)