Short Version: The core story and characters are good. The friends-to-lovers storyline and romance was good. The inevitable sex scene was decent. I'm interested in seeing what comes from this author as her skills develop, but it feels very much like a first novel.

Details:

However, there were a lot of new writer things that really broke me out of the story. Mostly it came down a lack of narrative time between mental states. A happy conversation rapidly turns unhappy when a stressful topic is accidentally mentioned, but then it's suddenly all good again.

The protagonist has convinced herself for a long time that expressing her feelings to her love interest (the pack alpha) will have terrible consequences for their relationship and the pack, but then within hours of a conversation about it with a friend - and essentially no time to internalize anything - she's managed to completely overturn those beliefs.

The world is fine, but there are so many things mentioned but not explained. There are werewolves, vampires, mermaids, werebobcats, werebears, humans, and who knows what else all just hang out and live around each other with no more problems than humans in the real world.

It feels wildly implausible to me that such diverse peoples - many of whom have strong ties to animal impulses - would have no more issues living and working side-by-side than humans do. I might be able to buy it if there was some sort of explanation, but there's literally none.

In the end I think I would have preferred it if there were about 100 more pages to fill in all the things in the world, and in people's backstories that are mentioned but not explained in any way. I want more time for characters to go between seemingly opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and time for new ideas to be internalized and processed by them.