Book Review: Everealm by J. D. Wright

I received this book as an ARC from Netgalley for an honest review.
Bree is a princess in Everealm. She has been in love with Rowan since she was fourteen years old. Unfortunately, he is not considered suitable and the fact that they went a little too far at one point means that he has been sent away to work as an assassin. When her father dies, Bree becomes Queen and there is the somewhat predictable story where Bree, Rowan, Dagan the wizard and others have to fight to save the kingdom from Bree's wicked uncle Silas and his wife.
The cover is lovely; that and the style of writing led me to believe that this was a YA fairy tale story. The book needs an editor (in my opinion). There is head-hopping between characters and a lot of poor phrasing that takes the reader out of the story. For example, "he certainly preferred her in red or deep green to match her eyes" made me wonder about the color of her eyes. Another example, "her body had rubbed against his groin, making it hard to concentrate on where he was leading his horse. And he was forced to rearrange his trousers to cover up his excitement caused by it". Was he excited by leading his horse or her body? There are a lot of sentences like this that just were not clear and stops the reader in order to try to understand what the author is saying. I can forgive a few instances of this, but there were too many throughout the entire book. I think an editor would have corrected this and made the book much better.
And this brings me to my second issue. This is definitely not a YA book. There are explicit sexual scenes of rape and violence. I don't particularly care if there is sex in a book, but here they are inserted somewhat gratuitously and I found them jarring. I don't think they were necessary and again they take the reader out of the story.
This book was a disappointment and I would not recommend it.

Link to Amazon