Thanks so much to Rosie Danan, Piatkus and NetGalley for the eARC. All opinions expressed are my own!

This is my first Danan book and won’t be the last. I loved this read! Such a unique and intriguing premise, the push and pull between Riley and Clark was a joy to follow. The tension was incredible, and I loved watching the characters fight their attraction. Riley was definitely my favourite character., steadfast in her abilities and the way she defends herself is brilliant. The pacing of the plot is well thought out and the writing is so well done.

This could have easily been 5 stars, but unfortunately the only aspect the fell short was the timing of the love confession which felt a little abrupt.

Regardless, this was an excellent read, I highly recommend!

I’d say this was a 3.5 for me. The whole concept of this book - mystical, curses, enemies to lovers trope really gets me but sadly something was missing in this book for me. Enjoyed the inner dialogue of the sexual thoughts more than the romance in the book but that by all means doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. I liked the banter between the characters but would have loved a bit more of that. Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for the arc

Sweet romance wrapped in a spicy tale of magical curses and need for professional redemption. I really enjoyed Rosie Danan's unique way of writing characters that are relatable and accessible. Riley and Clark have their own flaws, and bring out the worst in each other in their quest to redeem their careers. But ultimately that rivalry ends up peeling all the layers back until they see who they are underneath and you can't help but fall in love with the characters as they grow together. Would definitely recommend it if you're looking for a good standalone romance novel with a sprinkle of magic and curses.

Special thanks to Little Brown Book Group UK and Netgalley for providing me an advance copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and Piatkus for the ARC copy. All opinions are my own.

Riley is trying to continue the family business of curse breaking and a break or make opportunity presents itself when she's called to break the curse on an old castle in Scotland. However, when she gets there she meets handsome archaeologist Clark who doesn't believe in her skills. He tries to make her go off course and prove she's a charlatan, but Clark might have to think again. Riley's skills might be real and they might be his chance at redemption.

I loved the banter between Riley and Clark, especially how Riley proved herself over and over again. And the spicy... I was not expecting that level of hotness, but I was all here for it. Way to go! I hope we can have another book, this time with Clark's brother and Riley's friend as protagonists.

This was okay but something I will forget about the moment I'm done writing this review.
The plot was fine (if you're into magical realism/light supernatural). I'm not, so the whole plot came off a bit gimmicky. I felt there was a lot of detail and depth lacking making it hard to connect and to believe the story.

The atmosphere was almost non-existent. You could tell me the castle was located in Poland and I would have believed you. You can tell the author knows little to nothing about Scotland because barely any description of the landscape and the people were provided. I did not feel immersed in any way.

There is a scene towards the end Riley feels overwhelmed (take that with a pinch of salt) by the outpouring of the community during the festival. However, we as the reader see nothing about this community until the festival which is a bit slapdash in and of itself.

The chemistry between these two didn't really make sense and I think it's because again, no depth. It was about the lust and the attraction and their profession and that's it.

Throughout the entire story, we only hear of Patrick only to come to the epilogue and yay all is well. Um, could we read about the reunion please?

I struggled a lot with this book, not entirely sure why, I liked the writing and the plot but I just couldn't get fully invested in it.

I enjoyed the plot of trying to solve the curse a lot more than the romance, which I just didn't really feel. (minor spoilers) they start off meeting in a pub and hitting it off and liking each other, only to find out the next day they're both working at the same castle and a minor misunderstanding leads to them being 'enemies' and then over the course of the book they become lovers but I just didn't really feel the shift in feelings/really understand why they were enemies

There were some parts of the book I really enjoyed but overall it was a miss for me

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for the arc - all opinions are my own

- 3rd person, duel pov
- enemies to lover
- co-workers (kinda)
- curse breaking / solving

As soon as I saw this was available to request I leapt at the chance. Having read Danan’s previous books, I’d been waiting for a while. And I did enjoy it. But I just didn’t love it. I’m not normally a fan of a paranormal setting but this one just didn’t capture me like her other books.

I love Clark and Rosie but there was something about their relationship that felt a bit rushed. I loved their short lived journey but wished it would have been expanded a bit more. I would have loved to see further into their story.

My biggest disappointment was that the focus was on the curse but (and I might be stupid) but I still don’t really understood what broke it. And after all that reading I was left feeling a bit meh.

I love the way Rosie writes a love story and definitely won’t be put off. I just wish there had been less curse and more love.

First and foremost, Clark is from Manchester in England so he's one of my own ✊️. But the whole book itself is set in Scotland which is a beautiful setting!

This was a really interesting twist on the typical rom-com books im used to reading these days. I guess it's technically not contemporary since it does include the existance of curses and the main character having the ability to sense and break curses, but despite that it is still a very easy read.

The back and forth between the two characters was fun and it was full of cute tropes, all brought together by the curse that is trying to manipulate their lives.

I would say that calling this 'enemies' to lovers is a bit far, they have a conflict but they still get along very well and don't really deny that they like each other physically. I also feel like they fell in love very quickly and were ready to get very serious very soon after all the conflict was through.

Overall this is a fun, easy to read book that I recommend to anyone who enjoys contemporary romance.

Supernatural enemies-to-loves in a Scottish castle setting.

I adored Rosie Danan's Shameless books, and so was excited to see where she'd take this paranormal offering.

Riley is a curse-breaker who is trying to turn the family hobby into a career. This has taken her from her home in the US to a small town in Scotland, where a construction company wants an old curse removing from a castle. Then we have Clark, a sceptic and disgraced archaeologist, who is working to learn more about that same castle.

When the pair meet as strangers their chemistry is off the charts, but their first professional encounter is an entirely different story - making the two start to work completely against each other.

Unlike a lot of enemies-to-lovers books, Riley and Clark stay enemies for a decent length of time. Even with the growing physical attraction, any time they start to accept each other something sets things back. If you don't like characters with a mean streak then you're going to struggle here.

The steamy scenes in this book are incredible, as I've come to expect from Rosie Danan. All of the scenes, including a solo session for Clark, were spicy perfection.

I enjoyed the castle setting and the concept of its curse and history. At times it did feel a little bit like stepping through levels of a computer game - we've solved this puzzle so onto the next one. And that's the only thing I can really put my finger on as to why I wasn't as obsessed with it as I expected to be.

Overall I really liked this one, and would recommend it to anyone who likes a steamy MF romance with a supernatural twist.

I was so excited to read this - being a lover of Rosie Danan, enemies to lovers and occult novels, this was perfect for me!

Set in a castle in the Scottish highlands, this romance had the perfect backdrop. Though it featured the famous enemies to lovers trope, Do Your Worst felt like a totally original novel to me.

The characters, a cursebreaker and a disgraced archeologist, were endearing and I was rooting for them from the get go. The spice was 👌🏻too!

I enjoyed the Scottish folklore and history being woven in and liked to see how the story would unfold.

I can’t wait to read more by Rosie and thoroughly enjoyed this one!

Very sweet, I didn't feel it was as strong as Danan's previous books but I really enjoyed the characters and their chemistry - it was dragging towards the end the more they kept trying and failing to break the curse, especially as it felt like a foregone conclusion. But overall really liked it.

I LOVED this, I've already bought the Illumicrate special edition, and preordered it on Kindle, so was very happy to get an ARC as I've been really excited to read it and was not disappointed. The only thing I'd ask for would be more bossy Clarke 😍🤤

4.5 Stars

This was such a cute and fun read. I love an enemies to lovers book and felt this one was perfect. Once I started this one it was hard for me to stop, it really pulled me in which I love!

The book is set in Scotland and follows Riley an American curse breaker who take a job to break a curse in a spooky castle. This is where she meets Clark an English archaeologist who is trying to rehabilitate his career after a scandal.
I absolutely love the banter and rivalry between the two. It comes across so well.
I really enjoyed the authors writing style and felt it has a good flow throughout the book.
I’ll definitely be checking out more from this author in the future.


I definitely recommend this book if you enjoy romance and romance want a cute and fun read.

Thank you to Netgalley, the Author and the Publisher for an eARC copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I cannot even describe my excitement for this book. I knew I would love it just from it existence. The Mummy (1999 obviously) is one of my favourite films, it’s an absolute classic and you will instantly want to become an ancient Egyptian librarian. I genuinely think Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz could charge for bisexual awakenings.

So obviously this led to a lot of excitement for this book and I could not have been happier reading it! Agh Clark and Riley!!!!!

I honestly loved every second of it. The setting was delicious! Despite the fact I’m basically just a quick boat away, there’s something about rural Scotland that does have this eerie magical quality that will always provide the greatest setting for a haunted castle. The whole curse was so much fun to read - I’m definitely the type of person that would go on one of those ghost hunter shows, then get too scared lol. I loved Riley just showing Clark up at every turn. Their chemistry and back and forth was too good!

There were just so many little details and references that I screamed over! As much as I want to spoil them and scream about them all over again you’ll have to be happy over them for the first time yourself.

Now, I don’t know if y’all remember the show Time Team (probably UK only?) but I loathed it growing up. My dad and sister watched it every weekend and for some reason I sat through it every damn time and huffed over it. Now? I’d probs love it lol but I think it would need Clark and Riley going round in their campervan and we, as a nation, as a planet, would eat that up.

So yeah, Rosie did not miss with this book and I will NEVER be able to move on from it

I liked this book a lot, I think it had a great mix of humour and really well formed prose. I loved the development of curse breaking as a discipline, and the bits of history and mystery that played against each other through out. I enjoyed getting an insight into both halves of the couple, and I really loved them both as characters!

I will say this was little more smut heavy than I had anticipated! Not a bad thing necessarily, just not what I had been expecting. I think ‘steamy’ implies something in Hazelwood territory, but this was definitely closer to fanfiction in terms of content and frequency!

Overall, a great book, a lot of fun, and something I would recommend for any romance reader!

This was my first book from Rosie Danan, but definitely not the last one!
I absolutely loved the semi-spooky, atmospheric vibe if the Scottish setting and the boiling tension between the characters. I love a good rivals to lovers, and this was executed perfectly, spiced up and with amazing banter,
Perfect read for a cosy afternoon during Autumn!

Look, I know your average reader probably doesn’t care about the accuracy of this book, but I guess it just really hits diff when, much like the MMC, you’re also an Oxford-trained ancient Mediterranean archaeologist who now works in country houses, including country houses which used to be medieval fortress castles. I really do wish the author had done a little more research into archaeological things, rather than just name-dropping random techniques and hoping for the best. You CANNOT carbon date inorganic objects - like, say, a silver filigree dagger. And even if this dagger did have a wooden handle, why would our lovely archaeologist MMC even want to carbon date it when he had already dated it stylistically to the 18th century? Your carbon dating is never gonna be more accurate than that. The most laughable bit for me, though, was when, while standing on the first floor of the building, he complains about how he’d love to dig, but he doesn’t have a permit. What are you gonna dig? The floorboards?? Clearly, though, he later thinks, ‘fuck it’, and goes down to the dirt floor dungeon and starts randomly digging with a shovel. A* archaeological technique there, babes.

I feel like when writing a book like this, you really need an archaeologist friend on hand to ask random questions (or a nice online forum). I will absolutely be giving the author credit for the palaeontology-isn’t-archaeology joke at the 45% mark, though.

As you may have gathered, the research for this book is lack-lustre. I mean, this isn’t literary fiction, so perhaps it doesn’t need to be perfectly researched, but I feel like a bit more of an attempt would have been good. As another reviewer pointed out, even the research into the setting - Scotland - was lacking. We’re set in a little village somewhere around Inverness and Loch Ness, yet we ping all across Scotland, visiting the Isle of Skye and St Andrews.

And when we get onto the LiDar, lost Temple of Hercules, and the Bay of Cadiz stuff, I was horrified to see that this is ripped from an article on the Smithsonian’s website, which seems a little shady to the real life archaeologist who did that work. And yet the information presented in this book about LiDAR still makes no sense, which is unfortunate, as a key plot point somewhat hinges on what a character did with some LiDAR scans.

But enough about archaeology. I also found the rest of this book confusing. The characters seemed to keep randomly changing their minds about things, including important things like what the curse was trying to do. I kept asking myself, am I stupid? Am I too tired to be reading this? Am I periodically blacking out? There were times when I felt I had whiplash from the interactions between the FMC and MMC… also, the melodrama and cliched phrases, my god. The book was also too long - strange twists kept happening just as we seemed about to wrap up, but rather than being pleased by these plot twists, I was just annoyed.

Does this book have potential though? Absolutely. I loooved the ambiguity of the original curse and the whole curse mirroring thing. And I’m obvs a fan of an enemies-to-lovers trope and spooky season ambience, which is why I picked this up. I also thought the dual POV was really well-excited and I loved each of the character’s voices.

So, all in all, it’s 2 stars from me, because I really do think it has potential.

Finally, a word to the publishers / NetGalley at large: please, for the love of god, sort out the formatting on the Kindle download ARCs. I simply cannot bear to read another ARC where the paragraphing is all over the place - often making me confused about who’s speaking - and the words randomly run together.

P.S. You don’t need LiDAR to take 3D scans of a cave. There are much easier and cheaper ways of doing it.

P.P.S. Also I’m sorry but, as an academic, I simply cannot condone having sex in a rare books room.

do your worst is a steamy romcom with great banter set around a cursed castle in scotland. both clark and riley are hired to check for historical remains and break the curse, respectively. what starts out as a flirty moment between the 2 is soon ended when they realise why they are there and then the fun really starts. clark was a grumpy boy but we love him!

tropes: FORCED PROXIMITY
ENEMIES W/ BENNIES
PARANORMAL
WORKPLACE

(publisher note, i definitely prefer the american cover to the one pictured for the UK edition)

Uh...This didn't hit. Sadly.

1. Things I liked: The banter was good ok. I knew RD could write good banter, and the book got better after the main characters decided they didn't like each other (They have a very boring first meeting before this). The concept was fun. I really liked Clark actually and felt quite sympathetic for him.

2. Things I didn't like:
- The FMC, Riley, has zero functioning brain cells. The woman doesn't know that cats can eat chicken. She has to think that through, that if they can eat tuna they can eat chicken. She's also never heard of the trope enemies to lovers and has to literally ring her mother and ask her rather than googling it. It takes her forever to figure out the easiest curse in the world. She can't figure out that 'End to enemies' means...an end to being enemies. Also at one point she says "Who knew Scotland would be so wet." I rest my case.

- There was very little chemistry. I mean RD writes pretty good sex scenes, I will say that, but there's no life. No spark. No love. It's all just lust. I honestly didn't understand why Clark fell for her when she was pretty awful to him for the entire book.

- Clark is supposed to be from Manchester but at no single point in this book did I believe that except for like two lines in the epilogue. This is clearly a mistake but he switches between saying 'mom' and 'mum'. Using 'Blue collar' instead of working class. But it's not even just that. There was no yorkshire dialect. I just think if you're going to make the point of saying he's a working class hero from Manchester then maybe do some research into how people from Manchester speak. I guess she got around this with a throwaway line about him going to boarding school?

- As a run on from that point, this could have been set anywhere. The scottish setting barely did anything in the story. There were some clumsy attempts to make the characters sound more british. When they worked naturally, then I was quite impressed. But when they didn't work, it was SO obvious. For example, what relevance does "The sellotape is going to tear the wallpaper" and "He was thinking about how many sausage rolls he was going to buy from Greggs on the way home." I MEAN. WHAT? It was real cringe I'm sorry to say. I can see the author genuinely trying here and this makes me feel mean but. It didn't work.

Idk, it was fine. Just a bit basic. I never really felt connected emotionally to the story or the characters.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, as a lover of Rosie Danan's past works and a big lover of anything supernatural/fantasy I was super excited to get my hands on an arc of this book.

It reads very smooth, the whole aspect of curse breaking is so interesting, adding a bit of mystery to the book really gave it an extra leg to stand on. The romance was *chefs kiss*, I love the interactions between Riley and Clark. Their relationship is like cat and dog; they bicker, they argue but ultimately they cannot resist each other.

This was a super fun read and I will most definitely be purchasing a physical copy. I'm really hoping Rosie will continue to do a few more magical books like this.