Lady Macbeth's Reviews > Oyster

5 stars
So so good! Emotional beautiful, painful, hopeful, this story has it all.
Nico and Eti are at a breaking point in their lives when they met: Nico's mom is dying and his family (dad, little brother and little sister) is disintegrating under his very eyes, his dad is heavily drinking, his brother's selective mutism is back and his sister doesn't come out of her room. Plus a very demanding job at their oysters farm. Nico is sad for his mom and he lost every hope to keep his family together.
Eti is a woman in the body of a very famous, very talented male footballer, no one knows her real self, she doesn't know love nor intimacy, her body and talent made her adored by millions of fans, but they love Etienne, not Eti.

I adored that, since their first meeting, even when Nico recognised Eti as a football player, he never messed up her pronouns, never misgendered her. He saw a beautiful woman and he was attracted to her at first sight.

They start a very romantic relationship, Eti is so happy with Nico, she finally doesn't have to hide anymore, but the path of self acceptance is hard. Eti doesn't like her body and the intimacy between them is very hard at the beginning.
Nico is a true guardian angel and he does everything to support and protect her.

Nico's mum story is very sad but also very well written, The author really did a great job portraying all the different sides of grief, how they all reacted differently.

Florian (the MC of the previous book of the series, Salt) is amazing here, he's the best of friends, he's supportive, he gives all the right advices, he help Nico both with his grief and with his relationship with Eti.

I adored every second of this book, especially the last chapters, and I hope we'll see both Eti and Nico in the next of the series, Max's story.

This book is set in Europe, so I'm using the term football instead of soccer.

I received an ARC of this book from ForewordPR and this is my honest review