Unpopular Opinion: One for My Enemy by Olivie Blake

Drama, drama, drama and running in circles…

Synopsis

In New York City where we lay our scene, two rival witch families fight to maintain control of their respective criminal ventures. On one side of the conflict are the Antonova sisters, each one beautiful, cunning, and ruthless, and their mother, the elusive supplier of premium intoxicants known only as Baba Yaga. On the other side, the influential Fedorov brothers serve their father, the crime boss known as Koschei the Deathless, whose community extortion ventures dominate the shadows of magical Manhattan.

After twelve years of tenuous coexistence, a change in one family’s interests causes a rift in the existing stalemate. When bad blood brings both families to the precipice of disaster, fate intervenes with a chance encounter, and in the aftershocks of a resurrected conflict, everyone must choose a side. As each of the siblings struggles to stake their claim, fraying loyalties threaten to rot each side from the inside out.

If, that is, the enmity between empires doesn’t destroy them first.

Audiobook review

2 stars

UNPOPULAR OPINION ahead!

Drama, drama, drama and running in circles…

After reading The Atlas Six and now One for my Enemy, I came to the conclusion that Olivie Blake’s stories are just not for me.
There is something preventing me to really fall into them, to be convinced by what I am reading.

The Atlas Six frustrated me. I never knew if it was gibberish or genius, pedantic or sincere. If Olivie Blake was brilliant or if I was stupid.

Yet with One for My Enemy, I had high hope diving in the book. I loved the seven sisters, the powerful Maria, the golden boy Demitri. Ilove the enemies to lovers trope, the mafia even if it’s a magical mafia. In short: I had expectations.
But soon enough, the prose grated on my nerves. Lev and Sasha’s dialogs were either naive either overdramatic. The writing tried too hard to seem sophisticated and ended up needlessly flowery. I couldn’t help thinking it needed more sobriety.
But that being the retelling of a romantic play, maybe it was the goal all along?

I loved the beginning and the end (even if many were frustrated by that ending).
The story began strong but ended up repetitive with a visit to the Bridge and then more plotting. Someone dying then …a surprise.
I was bored and I wanted to stop listening.
It didn’t help that the narrator was not especially captivating compared to others I had listened to these past months. And in truth, they can make or break a book for me.

Then when we reaches the last scenes,  things got interesting again. Dramatic but not exaggeratedly so. And I was invested again.

I know that this is a very unpopular opinion and that I am in the minority as lots of people adore the book. I invite you to read other, more positive, reviews as well as Olivie is a sensation on TikTok and other media platforms. Surely there is something to it. And it certainly wasn’t as she half @ssed it or didn’t try hard enough. On the contrary. But this is how I experienced that book… 

Thanks for reading.

Sophie