This book was frustrating, and it made me very uncomfortable at times. I had gone into it with high expectations and unfortunately, they were not met.

Salem has been in love with Arrow since forever. She lives and breathes him and is extremely crushed when he starts dating her other sister. So crushed that when she hears that he is planning to propose to her sister she plots a plan to run away. Her plan doesn’t work, and she gets sent to a reformed school. But then Arrow gets suspended from his soccer team for punching his assistant coach and ends up being the coach at her high school.

I knew going in that this was going to be a forbidden type of love story. However, I wasn’t aware of how young Salem was going to be. I thought she was going to be much older. She’s eighteen, and there are several times where she sounds like she is 12. Arrow is like five years older than her, and it felt uncomfortable reading about them lowkey flirting on campus. Especially since he was in a position of power and many times it felt like he did cross that line.

And it doesn’t help the situation that Salem is so madly in love with him. She sounds like overly obsessed and dramatic fan. So reading in her POV felt awkward. Everything was about Arrow. Everything she did was for him. If he would have told her to rob a bank, she would have done it. No questions asked.

And Arrow’s POV was also frustrating because rarely did he think about Salem. He mostly thought about soccer or Sarah.

Arrow and Sarah (Salem’s sister) dated for 8 years. I felt like the author took the easy road with them. The word “convenient” kept being tossed around to describe their relationship. But they spent 8 years together and it took Arrow that long to figure it out? It felt as if the author was trying to come up with an easy way to make Arrow’s leap from Sarah to Salem in a short amount of time okay.

Sequentially, this book was trying to sell the romance between Salem and Arrow. And rarely did Arrow ever think about Salem or what she wanted. Quite honesty, he was a jerk to her and a little possessive. He was constantly telling her what to do or what to wear. And like several things in the book, it made me feel uncomfortable. This book is 500+ pages, yet I was 100% not sold on this romance at all. They lacked any real chemistry. And Salem felt more into Arrow than he was into her.

Separately, neither Salem nor Arrow have any major character development. For the entirety of the book, they remain as two dimensional characters without any growth.

In addition, the words “witchy” and “pouting” were overused so many times, it was getting annoying. The words were beginning to feel like characters.

Final Thoughts

My Darling Arrow features a frustrating and severely lacking story of a forbidden love story. The romance doesn’t have any real chemistry, the book is unnecessarily long, and the characters felt two dimensional.