Like always, I want to start my review with the positives: the main character and the arc said main character goes through over the course of The Crack at the Heart of Everything (henceforth referred to as TCATHOE) is truly near and dear to my heart, and has earned the book a good two-point-five stars all on its own. Unfortunately, the rest of it—worldbuilding, love interest, general plot, antagonist—only earns itself another point five.

I didn’t expect to like the main character, Orpheus, as much as I did, partly because he didn’t seem like a well fleshed-out character for the first third of the book, but by the halfway point I felt I’d gotten to know him enough to understand that that was the point—his whole journey begins with the fact that he’s never been allowed to be more than a cardboard cutout of a person, the stereotypical “dark wizard” holed up in their tower, and so, initially, he reads as exactly that. But as the story progresses, so does the complexity of his character, and I found him being written in this way quite genius and very fun to read! He is a very different character by the end of the book than he was at the beginning, in the best and most well-done sense possible, and his arc being his realizing he wants to be more than just useful, he wants to live was just very satisfying, heartfelt, and well-written.

However, I find the rest of TCATHOE to be fairly poorly-executed compared to that main character’s story, and as it is meant to be a romance, that means that not everything can be ignored. The world-building could be a bit better—I think that some of the exposition we get in the final third-or-so of the book could’ve been included in the first third instead to provide readers with a bit more context of what Orpheus is already aware of versus what we’re finding out along with him—and the limits of the magic system I find to be fairly vaguely defined. The plot itself is fairly simplistic—find a cure to a mysterious death curse—which isn’t a bad thing! But the “death curse” itself I had a lot of initial questions about that I think could’ve been answered by just a smidgen more worldbuilding before the discovery of said death curse so that its reveal actually holds weight for the reader, rather than TCATHOE just telling us that it’s a bad thing. As much as I hate saying it, because there are instances when you should tell rather than show, in TCATHOE’s case I do think it would have benefited immensely from some more showing instead of telling. Outside of Orpheus and his internal character arc, I felt like I wasn’t actually getting to form any of my own opinions or come to any of my own conclusions about people or events; I was just being told who they were, what that meant, and how I should feel about it.

However, the antagonist was one of TCATHOE’s redeeming qualities; I really liked Lore’s character, and I wish we got more of her. Not necessarily as an active character in the story—I think her level of involvement was pretty much perfect, honestly—but in that sort of “haunting the narrative” sense. This was still fairly well done through the flashbacks and how often Orpheus thinks of her, so I suppose this critique could be considered more personal preference than genuine criticism, but what else are reviews for? And on that topic, here’s a potentially unpopular opinion: I think TCATHOE would have benefitted from not being a romance.

I think it would’ve been much more impactful as a story focusing on Orpheus and Lore’s relationship—which it already is in many ways—rather than trying to do both that and Orpheus’s romance. This belief is mainly rooted in the fact that I just really, really believe that Fenrir’s character was written incredibly poorly, and adds nothing to TCATHOE. While Orpheus reading as two-dimensional seems to be an intentional choice—one that I love, and one that doesn’t persist as Orpheus develops as a character—Fenrir is absolutely just a cardboard cutout of “hunk of a man.” He has no personality outside of inexplicably (sorry, but inexplicably) having been pining for Orpheus for several years (me, forgetting exactly how many years it’s been since they met … so sorry) without having made any advances beyond shooting crossbow bolts at his head and calling him by an awful nickname. His presence in the story could’ve allowed it to delve deeper into the horrors of Lore’s war and the atrocities committed in her name, many of which committed by Fenrir himself, and have had his own arc be his grappling with this—all things that are hinted at or implied in TCATHOE but, as Orpheus had little to no knowledge of them, aren’t as pertinent to his arc. And there are brief moments of all this being done throughout TCATHOE, but not enough to even justify Fenrir’s existence as part of the main plot. Nothing explored through him goes beyond the surface enough that it couldn’t have just been explored through Orpheus (and then that lack of depth would’ve made a lot more sense!). Orpheus’s aforementioned arc—of wanting to live for himself rather than anyone else—would’ve been that much more impactful without Fenrir’s presence in the story. If he’d truly been “alone” leaving the castle at the beginning of TCATHOE and then gone through this arc of discovering himself along with the reality of the world outside the castle and its people—now Lore’s people, with every implication—any criticism I may have had would’ve been very minor. 

All in all, I did genuinely enjoy reading this book and I loved its main character, but I really believe it would’ve been a much more cohesive, impactful book either without the romance aspect entirely, or with the romance actually being between two three-dimensional characters rather than Orpheus and a cardboard cutout of a man. That being said, I would still recommend it.