Review copy provided by the publisher.
I knew this was not my sort of thing, and I was correct, but Nghi Vo writes so well that I thought it was worth giving this specific instance of not-my-sort-of-thing a try, and that was also correct. This is in some ways like a billionaire romance if the author was really honest about the morality of billionaires. And also if the billionaires were literally natural disasters taken on (occasional, voluntary) human form.
So yeah, not a lot like most billionaire romances…but it does have the attention to luxury detail, tuned to a dark fantasy precision. Give our heroine a makeover? why not lend her entirely new faces? What happened to the previous owners of those faces? Don’t ask that, smile, look how beautiful you are as someone else! So beautiful you could charm a hurricane. Literally. There are dances galore leading up to the titular ball, there is backstabbing and politicking and exquisite clothing, and there are forest fires masquerading as people for fun and profit. And getting boatloads of both.
If you’re hoping for a moral ending where the wicked suffer and the good are rewarded, this is not that book. If you can be satisfied with something a bit more visceral, well…this might be the thing for you. Especially if you like either the trope of “dangerous rich man, I can change him” or that trope’s subversion.