Review: Stone Guardian by Danielle Monsch

Entwined Realms #1

Summary via Goodreads:

"Gryphons flying past skyscrapers? Wizards battling it out in coffeehouses? Women riding motorcycles with large swords strapped to their backs? All normal sights since the Great Collision happened twenty-six years ago.

Well, not normal for everyone. Larissa Miller may have been born after the Great Collision, but as a history teacher who lives in the human-only city, she has never come into contact with any other race or species, nor has she wanted to. Her life is as ordinary as it gets - that is, until one day she walks out of her apartment and is attacked by a mob of Zombies, only to be saved by a Gargoyle.

Gargoyles trust no one outside their Clan, but due to a cryptic prophecy, Terak, Leader of the Gargoyles, has been watching over the human woman for months. While he can find no reason why the woman has been singled out, something about her stirs every protective instinct within him. When the attack confirms that the threats against her exist and are real, he convinces Larissa that though their races have never been allies, the best chance of discovering why she has been brought into his world is by working together.

In the course of their investigation, Terak becomes entranced by his little human. But when he discovers why Necromancers want her and the great reward that awaits him if he betrays her, he must choose between the welfare of his Clan and not only Larissa’s life, but the fate of this New Realm as well."

This is the first book in Danielle Monsch's Entwined Realms series. I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. And while I loved the story, I love the world she created, I loved the plot and all the characters. There was still one blazing thing wrong with this book. It makes me sad to proclaim it because I really did love all those things about this book. But there were just far too many typos.  Mostly simple things, using "they" instead of "the", "sent" when "sense" was meant to be used. But there were too many, and after a while It seemed like I was doing more proofreading than just enjoying the book itself. Also, a minor annoyance was some of the terminology used during the 'sultry' scenes were words that I wouldn't choose, but that's just me and my preferences.

Onto the happy things about this book. The story focuses around a human named Larissa Miller, and a Gargoyle named Terak in a world where a land of magic and myth has merged into our normal world. They called this "The Great Collision". Larissa is being targeted by a necromancer, and the Gargoyle (Terak) starts watching over her and then protecting her. Over the months of keeping an eye on her from a distance, he slowly falls in love with her. He keeps his distance until one evening she is attacked by zombies, and he rescues her. While trying to find out who and why they are after her, Larissa develops feelings for Terak, though neither party admits this out loud. All the silent longing for each other makes when they finally voice these feelings far into the book make it, in a way, more realistic than most other romance novels. Which is a nice change considering that in most 'romance' novels, the two characters that are meant to be romantically involved, start to be intimate with each other after only a couple of days.

The two main characters in the book are really interesting. Terak, as the leader of the Gargoyle clan he starts to become conflicted with choosing to spend more time around Larissa, and his duties as clan leader. While Larissa starts to become a little conflicted in not telling her tight-knit family about spending all her time with a Gargoyle.

The story is really good, as is the world that was created, but those typing errors made me sad inside, without those it could have been a fantastic one of the best I've read this year.