This is a fun, different idea for a rom com. Focusing on the world of LARP (live-action role-play) and with a narrator who suffers from anxiety, this is an enemies to lovers story for nerds.

I’m not the target audience – the narrator is in her twenties, I rarely read rom coms, I’m not into the costumes and swords – yet the book has something going for it. Timid Daisy leaves her Lincolnshire home to teach a knight summer school for children at the Tower of London. When she channels her alter-ego, a fierce warrior, she can face anything. There, she clashes with troublemaker Teddy, a minor royal.

I thought the plot was all right, the settings good, although the characters could have been more developed. I didn’t like Teddy. I think Daisy should have got with Ellis, the archivist. I appreciated Daisy’s mental health representation but wanted to know if she had tried to get help other than from her very supportive family. I suspected also that she was supposed to be neurodiverse.

My main problem with this book was the writing. The expressions often didn’t seem right and certain words were repeated a lot. The narrative style was odd, a mixture of naive young adult and olde-worlde speak which reflected Daisy’s immaturity and interests. Strangely, she used a word which I’d never heard before and had to look up: ‘hamartia’. This is a term from Greek drama which means a fatal flaw or mistake which leads to a character’s downfall. I would not expect to find this word in a rom com!

I suspect that the book is neither romantic nor funny enough for some fans of the genre and the nerdy aspect won’t be everyone’s cup of mead.

Published by HarperCollins, 2024.