Temple of Swoon by Jo Segura
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars**
🧡💜💚🧡💜💚🧡💜💚🧡💜💚🧡
Dr. Miriam Jacobs is on the most important mission of her life, to find Cidade da Lua, the Lost City of the Moon, in the Amazon rainforest. It’s her first chance to lead an expedition and prove herself as a serious archaeologist.
Rafael Monfils is a journalist who has joined the expedition, with the hopes of chronicling their search for the lost city, or at least that’s what they think he’s doing.
In truth, Rafael is on a mission of his own, and that’s to stop the team from ever setting eyes on Cidade da Lua, thus protecting his mother’s legacy. All he needs to do is keep them off the correct path.
Once Rafa meets Dr. Jacobs though, he has a really hard time staying focused on his task. The more he gets to know her, the more he wants her to succeed. What’s a guy to do?
As they get further into the jungle, it becomes clear they aren’t the only ones searching for the Lost City. Soon, Rafa’s mixed feelings and Dr. Jacobs’s imposter syndrome are going to be the least of their worries.
Temple of Swoon was lightyears beyond Segura’s 1st-book, Raiders of the Lost Heart, for me, to which this is a companion novel. I enjoyed these main characters, Rafa and Miri, soooo much more, though I still had some slight issues with it.
Nevertheless, I am very happy I picked it up and am glad I took another chance on this author. If there’s another companion novel, I’m def game.
It’s funny, one of the things that I disliked the most about the Raiders of the Lost Heart was the female main character, Dr. Corrie Mejía. Going into this I thought, it’s fine, this one follows different people, you won’t have to deal with her.
While that may be true, at the start of this book, as we’re meeting our new female lead, Miri, we learn she is sort of a mentee of Corrie in the archaeological space, and Corrie handpicks her for this position.
At the start, Miri goes on and on about how drop-dead, off-the-charts, hot Corrie is. No other woman ever has, or ever will, compare to her. ((puke)) That was one of the things that drove me nuts about the 1st-book, and here it was, rearing it’s ugly head yet again!!
Luckily though, that trend did sort of peter out as the story went along. I did like how quickly this kicked off as far as Miri and Rafa’s meet cute. I liked their chemistry from the start and enjoyed watching their relationship grow.
The way this author writes sex scenes are not at all to my tastes, they’re definitely more ewww than awww for me, but what I did appreciate here was the genuine conversations that Miri and Rafa had.
I liked the more serious sides of the story a lot. We delved into Miri’s insecurities, as well as Rafa’s family stuff and I felt that was very well developed.
Overall, I enjoyed this so much more and am really glad that I gave this author another shot. I feel like if her work keeps progressing we could have a real win with the next book. I’m looking forward to it!
Thank you to the publisher, Berkley, for providing me a copy to read and review. I enjoyed this romantic adventure!