Winterbourne
A.M. Blythe
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication date: July 15, 2026
Genre: Fantasy Romance
Rating:
Three rules keep a memory thief alive.
Rule #1: Don’t touch skin.
Rule #2: Don’t look too long.
Rule #3: Don’t let them see what you really are.Tonight, I’m breaking all three.
Kira Shadowmere is the best memory thief in Vespera — a city where memories are bottled, sold, and savored like wine, and the people they’re stolen from are left to rot. One touch, one pull, thirty seconds: she can lift the worst night of your life right out of your head. The Guild pays in silver. Her conscience pays in everything else.
But memory thieves don’t live past twenty-four. Tomorrow is her birthday.
One last job should buy her way out. Instead, it binds her — soul-deep, unbreakable, fatal — to Lysander Winterbourne: the last son of a slaughtered house, the lord who executes thieves like her, and the only person in the world whose presence quiets the curse that’s been drowning her since she was three years old.
She should run. He should kill her. Neither of them does the smart thing.
Now the Guild’s master wants her caged, a power no Null should have is waking in her blood, and the deeper Kira digs, the clearer the truth becomes: she isn’t the only memory thief in this story. Someone has been inside her head. Someone has been editing. And what they took will cost her the only family she has left.
My thoughts…
I was so excited to dive into this book. It sounded new and fresh, and I was all about this adventure with a memory thief. However, this book just didn’t work for me.
At first I thought it was just that I was not used to the author’s writing style, or maybe just needed more time to connect with the characters. As time went on, and I was 3/4 of the way through the book and still struggling, I knew it was time to put the book down. It was just words to me. There were times where I was able to picture scenes, but then I would have a hard time holding onto that image as I read. I think a lot of it stemmed from the writing. There was a lot of repetitiveness throughout the book. We would be given a feeling, thought, or even dialog, and a line or two later, we would get the same thing again, but maybe with one word changed. This happened quite a bit and it really took me out of the story. I am also not sure what happened with the scene between Kira and Gideon. Her name is Kira. The synopsis tells us that, and all the characters in the book call her that. Yet, when she goes to see Gideon, he calls her Kirstie, and there’s no explanation of it. No, “he’s losing his memory of me”, “he always called me Kirstie as a way to hide my identity”, or any other way to tie in the fact that her pseudo father figure is calling her some random name.
I love the idea of this story. I see the world that the author tried to create and it’s rich and deep. There are a lot of players in this story, and they are not all just black and white. There’s a complexity to them that molds their actions. I feel like if this went through a good editing and scrub down it would shine and be right up there with the big fantasy romances.
