The Ruins Beneath Us

By: Sasha E. Sloan

Narrated by: Casey Holloway

This first book in a romantasy duology by TikTok star Sasha E. Sloan combines a compelling love triangle, luscious worldbuilding, and spellbinding magic to deliver a debut with everything romantasy fans crave.

Young elf Lyria has spent her life in hiding while a dangerous war brews between the elven kingdom and human world. Now eighteen, she has grown restless hiding on the outskirts of the forest that surrounds the human world. One day, while her mother is away, Lyria hears a boy in the forest calling for help and rescues him from certain death. Unbeknownst to her, the boy, Finn, is the crowned Prince, and he wants Lyria to become the kingdom’s royal apothecary!

Terrified that Finn is going to discover she’s an elf and she used magic to heal him while he was unconscious, Lyria struggles to fit in with the human kingdom while also hiding her identity. At court, she meets the jaded Head Healer, Cygnus, who is cold, highly suspicious of her, and constantly questions her abilities. But earth-shattering secrets can’t lay dormant forever, and after Lyria and Cygnus discover a dark and sinister world hidden underneath the palace, Lyria must decide once and for all who—if anyone—she should trust.

This slow-burn YA romantasy will be written by BookTok sensation Sasha Sloan and will appeal to fans of other successful TikTok hits like Lightlark and Assistant to the Villain.

©2026 Disney Enterprises, Inc. (P)2026 Disney Hyperion Digital

Incredible Until the Ending Fell Apart

Incredible buildup completely undone by a confusing, rushed, and borderline unedited ending.

This was honestly shaping up to be one of my favorite reads of the year.

I’m frustrated writing this because for most of this book, I was completely invested. The world-building was rich, the characters were compelling, and it genuinely felt like it was building toward something great.

And then the ending completely unraveled.

Chapter 32 ends one way, and then chapter 33 opens in a completely different situation with no explanation. It’s so abrupt and disconnected that I genuinely thought I missed pages or that it was some kind of dream or vision sequence.

And then it happens again with chapter 34 (the final chapter). Another jarring shift, another completely different setup that doesn’t logically follow what we just read. At that point it stops feeling like a storytelling choice and starts feeling like a structural failure.

Major events are skipped over, characters are somehow captured, freed, and moved around off-page, and huge logistical gaps are just ignored. There’s no payoff, no clarity, no sense that the ending was thought through. It reads like unfinished work.

The epilogue doesn’t fix it… it makes it worse. It drops you into a “resolved” ending that the story never actually earns, with relationships and outcomes that feel completely ungrounded.

What’s most frustrating is how strong this book was up until the last stretch. It had the depth and momentum to be incredible honestly, it should have been expanded, not crammed into a rushed ending.

It genuinely feels like the last two chapters skipped editing entirely, and unfortunately that’s what you’re left remembering.