Assistant to the Villain

She supposed that was why she reconciled her work so easily in her mind. She had no idea what The Villain’s end goal was, aside from doing everything to screw over the king. But Evie knew the important things—he didn’t take advantage of his female employees, he paid all his workers fairly, and he requested his cauldron brew with at least a pound of sugar.
The last fact was not as relevant as his other virtues, but it was Evie’s favorite.

I'll preface by saying that I'm not at all familiar with the TikTok series the novel originated from, so I might be missing out on some of the context. Then again, this is supposed to be a regular book, not a fanfic, so I don't think it should depend on the reader's familiarity with the source!

Overall, I think the story has good bones and a bunch of great ideas, and that's precisely why the execution was so disappointing. It's like i kept getting promised cookies and given plain bread instead. The first 100 pages or so are at least internally consistent and resemble what I was promised by the cover and the blurb, although Evie isn't exactly who I envision when I think about a "sunshine" person. From the tone of the early office chapters and the way the book was promoted, I expected a bubbly, ever-kind, ever-optimistic cinnamon roll. Evie probably thinks she is that, but she's not. She's awkward, keeps acting younger than her age, has a slightly cringy sense of humor, and she feels more angry than kind or optimistic, just hiding it under a veneer of niceness. The Villain keeps praising her for being surprising and thinking outside the box or something, but I see none of that. Maybe he should talk more to his other employees. A lot of them seem more fun.

Oh, and speaking of the Villain/Trystan: for all that he has quite a few POV chapters, they hardly tell us anything about him. They seem mostly to revolve about his growing feelings for Evie, even when he should have other things on his mind, like, you know, people trying to kill him and planting bombs in his uber secret HQ. In fact, pretty much all of the truly important developments and revelations about the Villain's own life are shown through Evie's POV, and then when we get to the Villain's next chapter, he's barely concerned with all the big stuff, because Evie just sneezed prettily or whatever. This kind of turns Evie into a Mary Sue type of character, not in the "oh, look how perfect she is" sense, but in the sense that the world and the narrative keep bending around her to artificially boost her importance.

The mood of the book is... swingy. It tries to be a spoopy cozy fantasy. It tries to be an office comedy. It tries to be a romance. It tries to be both insta love and slow burn. It tries to tackle serious topics, like sexual assault and being let down by parents and being shoved into the caretaker role for a younger sibling and dealing with a parent's chronic illness. It goes back and forth between flirting with those topics and presenting a cartoonish world where a bloody head hanging from the rafters is no biggie as long as the guy who did it is nice and pays you on time. The stakes feel super low for most of the book because of that cartoonish aspect, then they suddenly escalate. The office comedy aspect starts off promising, then dwindles just when the relevant side characters seem to start gaining depth.

Honestly, it's all just... very messy and feels like the author wasn't sure what kind of story they were trying to tell. Perhaps a couple of extra rounds of developmental editing would have helped figure that out and whip the book into a better shape.