The Orc and the Innkeeper

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The Orc and the Innkeeper was one of those books that I could not put down. I found myself gasping and kicking my feet giggling throughout the story. It follows two characters who start out as “enemies”. Thorak traumatically teased Mariah growing up. It was so bad, that all these years later, she is still suffering the effects. Situations occur and they pretend to be fake engaged in order to get a human investor to work with Thorak.

The story follows the standard framework for a typical romance novel: the background information on both characters, the eventual coming together, the romance, the third act breakup/blowout, followed by the reconnection, HEA. This story also relies heavily, I mean HEAVILY, on the miscommunication trope. I mean like, the whole story. I would normally mark down in ranking for that, but the whole story was still just so fun and so cute. It is a great little cozy, spicy, monster romance, and I was here for it the whole time.

I really enjoyed all of the side characters. I think each one enhanced the story to help further it along. The characters all had things going on in their lives, but all still were brought together. There were several points of high drama, I will let you read those for yourself, and they definitely amped up the miscommunication tropes.

I liked that the internal “racism” wasn’t just one sided. There were humans who did not want to do business with Orcs (which is the whole purpose of this story) and even Orcs who were very anti human (such as Thorak’s parents, and Thorak’s bullying of Mariah when they were younger). I like how it showed the progression of these characters to adopt new mindsets, and how it is not always easy to do so.

The spice was nice, but it is not SUPER spicy. It has enough, but comes a bit later in the book.

Overall, the story was well written. I read it so fast, it is not a terribly long book. I am definitely looking forward to Ecco’s story in book 2. I think Elderberry Falls needs to have a vacant house so I can just move right in 🙂