In Wait for Love, Unity and Ollivander have been soul mates for all of Unity’s life, but they haven’t seen each other for the last 8 years. When Unity is given the chance to return to Ollivander, the two must come to terms with the changes in their relationship and what that means for their future.
I got this book as an ARC from BookSirens, and the reason I picked it is because the author presented a situation where there is a significant age gap between two soul mates, and I wanted to see how they dealt with that. I like to read books with similar situations to the ones I’d like to write in the dream book that I keep plotting, but never get around to writing, much less finishing. I like to see how other people handle it.
I ultimately found Wait For Love to be a good read for the main plot, but the background stuff presents an issue. For one, this book is part of a series and it feels like Linda Kage, the author, spends too much time getting you caught up to appreciate that they at least tried to make it work as a standalone. There’s also the juxtaposition of having a character from what is supposed to be Earth in 2020 having to come to terms with being stuck whatever medieval fantasy time period this series is setting in. In theory, it should be funny, but in practice it’s a bit jarring.
I want to talk about this book without getting into spoilers, but the reason I even gave this book three stars is because of the way Kage handled some of these situations. Having that time-travelling dimension-jumping character meant that we got a differing opinion of how these fantasy tropes really work, and I appreciated that. However, you can see where Kage has the character mention things from the real world that are meant to be comedic, but just falls flat because they seem super unnecessary in their specificity. Like, why mention Post Malone when most of your characters have no reference for it, and neither might some of your intended audience?
Still, now I understand why some authors do make those vague references. It’s perfectly okay if your characters don’t get it, and an extra “ah-ha!” moment for the readers that do.
That being said, I felt like Kage missed a few moments by not exploring a few ideas that she tapped on in the book. The circumstances around how Unity and Ollivander knew each other so well, and the whole bastard son of a king thing really could have done with some more exposition or something. The decision not to dig deeper makes it seem like these things may have been better explored in previous books in the series, but that wouldn’t make sense since they’re so integral in this book. Like, we get a whole reveal about the world the series takes place in – which is actually integral to a major subplot in this book – but Kage won’t have the conversation about what happened with Unity’s parents and how Unity feels about that?
So recently I’ve found myself saying that I appreciate regular Fantasy in comparison to YA Fantasy because I like for my characters to have sex. I’ve come to regret my words a little. Not to say that Kage cannot write a sex scene – or that there were a lot of them – but some of the details just were not working out for me. And it may just be that most fantasy series tend to favor an ambiguous, but decidedly medieval time period, but- if I write anything else it will definitely be a spoiler.
Ultimately, I did enjoy Wait For Love, and I think it’s a nice addition to the Soul Mate/Soul Mate-Identifying Marks trope, especially because the summary wants you to think that they won’t get together in the end. (It is obvious that they will so I don’t consider that a spoiler.) I would recommend it to those who like those tropes for research.
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Eurydice Howell 