🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 5/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Last Days of Lilah Goodluck yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
The premise alone had me hooked before I even started — a woman gets told by a good witch that she’s going to die in eight days, and by the way, here’s your soulmate’s full name, good luck with that. It sounds like it should be chaotic, and it is, but it’s the good kind of chaotic. Kylie Scott’s writing has this quality where everything is cheeky and fun without ever tipping into silly, and the way her characters talk to each other is just… I can’t fully explain it, I just know I love it. If you’ve read Text Appeal, you’ll feel it immediately. Same energy, same writer.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Witch and the Five Predictions
We open with Lilah sitting in front of Good Witch Willow at a party, completely blanking on what question to ask. Willow leaves before she can think of one. On her way out, she spots Willow about to get hit by a car and saves her. So now the witch feels like she owes her something.
Willow gives her five predictions. One: her boyfriend is cheating on her. Two: her soulmate is Alister George Arthur Lenox. Three: this week’s lottery numbers. Four: she’s going to get passed over for a promotion. Five: she’s going to die. Next Sunday, in fact.
Lilah heads home feeling skeptical, absolutely planning to prove this woman wrong. But she just couldn’t stop herself from buying a lotto ticket with the numbers she remembered on her way home — just in case.
She gets home and her boyfriend Josh is literally cheating on her. He’d just moved in and hasn’t even finished unpacking. She sends him packing. A couple of hours later she gets called in to cover a sick colleague. Her boss essentially tells her that a children’s librarian position is coming up, not to get too excited because she’s already promised it to Brian, and oh by the way she’s been passed over for a few other promotions too. That’s two for two in less than twenty-four hours.
The Parking Lot Incident and the Bloody Mary
Leaving work, mad about the promotion, Lilah almost gets into an accident. She swerves into a concrete pillar, a man gets out furious that she almost hit him, and it’s Alister. The man she was just told is her soulmate. She completely panics and heads to the bar down the road where she orders a Bloody Mary. Never had one before. No better time than the present.
Alister follows her in. He wants to know what’s wrong with this woman who lost it the moment she saw him. She eventually breaks and tells him about predictions one, two, and three. He’s skeptical, chalks it up to coincidence, starts to leave. And then she says she also has the day she’s going to die. That stops him cold. He stays to see if the lotto numbers come through.
They do. Five correct numbers. That’s a pretty significant coincidence, but that’s all she could remember.
Lilah is now sitting at about 70% certainty that the witch was telling the truth. She starts making what she’s calling a wish list — not a bucket list, a wish list — and it turns out she won somewhere around a quarter million dollars after taxes, which does help. She visits her parents, starts getting her affairs in order, and is cautiously preparing for the possibility that she might actually die next Sunday while still holding out hope that she won’t.
Also of note: Alister is the illegitimate son of a king. His romantic history involves eleven long-term partners who all ended up married to someone else immediately after dating him. He is basically the equivalent of Good Luck Chuck. He’s been burned and burned out, and he is not in the market to be anyone’s soulmate.
The Paparazzi Problem
A photo of Lilah leaving the bar with Alister gets picked up by the press. He was just driving her home, but now she’s the mystery woman in the gossip rags. Her ex Josh texts to call her a cheater, which is rich. And then Alister tracks her down at her apartment building — he knows roughly where she lives, just not which unit — and goes door to door until she stumbles upon him, because he was worried about the paparazzi situation.
He ends up coming in and finding her wish list. One of the items is a ride in a convertible. He says he knows someone with one, he’ll pick her up tomorrow. One time thing, though. Don’t misuse his number.
He picks her up. While they’re out, someone who knows his mom spots them and she immediately calls and summons them over. Lady Helena, Alister’s mom, who is an absolute entertaining force of nature. While there, Lilah tries absinthe. When he drops her home she starts to ask him about doing something and he cuts her off before she can finish, saying he’s busy without even knowing what the question was.
Then a photo surfaces of Lilah looking sad as he drives away. Alister broke another heart, the press says. Now she can’t go home without being identified. She checks into a supposedly haunted hotel to lay low. The plan is to rest, give her liver a break, do absolutely nothing. That lasts about five minutes before she’s bored out of her mind and heads down to the speakeasy bowling alley. Something else she has never done is bowl.
Alister finds her there. He says it took a lot of work to track her down. He wants to know if she has been offered money for a press interview — the crown specifically wants to know. She’s personally offended that he would even assume. She tells him he can leave. He gets in the elevator with her anyway. He stays, they fall asleep watching TV, and wake up cuddled together.
He leaves the next morning and goes out to lunch with someone else, pulling all the press attention off Lilah. She goes home and finds her best friend Rebecca and Lady Helena inside, having discovered that Lilah has been researching burial plots and writing a will. She has to explain everything. The witch, the predictions, all of it.
The Spiritual Cleansing
Lady Helena decides Lilah needs a spiritual cleansing. Her version involves shooting essential oils at Lilah with a pump-action squirt gun, intermittently throwing Himalayan sea salt at her — which absolutely stings when it gets in the eye — and having Lilah chant mantras the entire time. It is one of the funniest scenes I have listened to in an audiobook in a long time. Lady Helena is an absolute wild card and I love her for it.
The Motorcycle, the Ex, and the Library
Alister shows up with a motorcycle to take Lilah out. They’re heading out when her ex Josh appears at the door with a single rose. A single rose. After cheating on her and being verbally abusive. The two of them ride off without even acknowledging him.
Alister takes her on a tour and they end up at his place. She discovers he has a huge, empty library and starts unpacking it. While they’re there, his business partners drop by and one of them is clearly flirting with Lilah. Alister does not like it. He gets possessive and weird and completely denies that there’s anything between them. She calls him on it directly. He won’t let her leave because he wants to talk it through, and when she asks why it matters so much, he says because if you leave, you won’t want to see me again. And that is the moment where you realize he is already far more invested than he has been pretending to be.
They make out.
The Pretty Woman Moment and the Fake Engagement
He calls her the next day and asks her to come pick something up. When she arrives, he reveals it’s a Pretty Woman shopping trip with a black card. She can spend whatever she wants. It was on her wish list and he just quietly made it happen.
When they get back to his place, his mom’s car is there and so is royalty — Princess Lexi, the king’s sister. The conversation goes sideways fast. There’s a lot of commentary about Lilah being too normal, too ordinary, not suitable. Lady Helena, who has heard enough of this, tells Lexi she can’t talk to her future daughter-in-law that way. Lexi, shocked, asks if they’re actually engaged. Lady Helena says yes, and literally tosses Lilah one of her own rings as proof. Pure chaos. Absolutely iconic.
Lexi mentions the king is now willing to acknowledge Alister, with caveats because of course there are caveats.
After Lexi and Helena head out, Alister and Lilah are left alone. He’s clearly uncomfortable having her in his home — he has these specific rules about what he allows when he’s dating someone, and she’s already in the middle of all of them. She tells him she’ll step back if that’s what he needs, even if it means giving him space to have something with his father. He tells her he’d rather have her than someone who has never wanted anything to do with him.
So apparently they’re dating now. They spend the night together, and in the morning Alister casually mentions the relationship like it’s already been settled. She asks when exactly that happened. He says he made a great speech and figured she was just too in love with him to answer. I don’t know how to describe this man except that I love him. Then his phone blows up — the engagement has been leaked to the press and he tells her she can’t take it back now. Too late.
Her best friend Rebecca is freaking out. Her mom calls. Nobody can get a word in edgewise to explain it isn’t real.
Turns out the king’s legitimate heir James has gone missing. He was supposed to go through with an arranged marriage he wanted nothing to do with and just disappeared. The king’s office leaked the Alister engagement news to divert media attention from that. Later it also comes out that Princess Lexi had originally leaked news about Alister’s existence to the press years ago because she was jealous of attention the king’s new bride was getting. This matters because Alister had spent years believing his mom was the one who did that. When they’d visited Willow, she’d told Alister he was wrong about his mother, and now we know exactly what she meant.
Meeting the Parents
They go to lunch at Lilah’s parents’ place. Her mom is understandably upset about hearing the engagement news from other people first. She interrogates Alister — Lilah can be difficult, she’s a lot of work, she’s stubborn. Alister just takes it, all of it, without flinching. And then her mom asks him whether Lilah has his heart. He says yes. By the end of the meal, he’s telling her parents the engagement is real. When Lilah asks him afterward why he did that, he says her parents just seemed so happy and hopeful and he didn’t want to crush that. He’s not even sure himself what he’s doing.
Then his mom calls. The king is on his way.
Alister tells Lilah about the one time he ever met his father. He was six. The king had come to tell Lady Helena that Alister needed to go to boarding school out of the country. His mom refused. The only thing his dad ever said to him was move — he was literally in the man’s way. Alister didn’t even realize he had a father until he overheard the conversation. His mom had told the king she wasn’t willing to hide his dirty secret, meaning Alister, and then the king left. That’s the whole relationship.
A Word on Doogle
I have to stop here because Doogle — Lady Helena’s constant companion — has been this quiet, steady background presence through the entire book and he deserves a mention. He’s always with Helena. Always. He keeps her grounded, calls her out when she’s being too much, stops things from going completely sideways.
When Helena found out she was pregnant, Doogle was there for her. Not the king. When the press came for them, Doogle left Scotland and moved to America with her. He has never left her side. He and Helena have never been together — not once, as far as anyone knows. And when Alister is spiraling about his father’s visit, it’s Doogle who takes him aside, goes to a gym, and holds the punching bag while Alister works out the anger. He is surrogate dad, steadying force, the most loyal person in this story, and I almost wonder if none of us have been paying close enough attention to him.
The King’s Visit
They sit in a room with the king and there’s just silence. Finally, Alister asks why he’s there. The king mentions they’ve met before. Alister says yes, I know, I was in your way, you told me to move. Doogle immediately pipes up — he was just a little kid, how could you treat him like that?
The king’s actual reason for showing up is to ask if Alister has seen James. Alister knows exactly where James is — he and his brother have been quietly texting for years building a relationship nobody knew about, and James is currently in Romania with a supermodel, very intentionally not getting married. Alister isn’t giving that information to anyone.
Lady Helena’s Grand Exit
Lady Helena, who has been listening to the king show up and ask about his other son, makes her announcement. She is done. She is blocking his number, his office numbers, and all of his lackey numbers. She asks him to respect her request and leave her alone. Then, in true Lady Helena fashion, she turns to Doogle and asks him if he feels like eloping. He says he thought she would never come to her senses and ask.
The king says something dismissive about Doogle being her gardener or butler. Doogle says yep, and he’ll make sure to do a damn good job of being her husband too. She spent years entangled with this man who treated her as an inconvenience, and the person who has been beside her through all of it is the one she finally turns to. It is one of the best moments in the book.
The Pool, the Prediction, and the Confession
The king keeps going on at Alister about marrying someone suitable, about now being willing to be seen with him at smaller events. How generous. Alister says he wants to be with someone he loves. He loves Lilah.
Lilah, tired of being discussed like she isn’t in the room, steps outside to stand by the pool. A bird attacks her, literally swoops at her, and as she tries to dodge, she slips, hits her head and falls in, losing consciousness. She stops breathing and Alister said she had no pulse.
Alister jumps in and pulls her out.
Willow’s prediction came true. She actually died and he saved her.
When she comes to, he tells her directly that he loves her. The king quietly mentions he was never officially there and sees himself out. Nobody stops him.
The Epilogue
Lady Helena and Doogle are married. James is still in Romania, happy, not missing. The king reaches out with an invitation to James’s eventual wedding — no strings attached this time.
Best Part of This Book
The spiritual cleansing scene with the squirt gun and the Himalayan salt to the eye is one of the funniest things in this book, full stop. But the moment that’s going to stick with me is Lady Helena turning to Doogle in front of the king and asking him if he wants to elope. After everything, after all that time of them just being each other’s constant, always just short of something. And he says he thought she’d never come to her senses and ask. I just love that.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 — Some heat, present later in the book, not the main focus. It has some spice but not overpowering.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Completely satisfied. Willow’s prediction came true in a way I didn’t see coming, the confession happens in the most Alister way possible, and the side storylines — Lady Helena and Doogle, James and his disappearance — all wrap up in a way that’s satisfying and fun. No loose ends, no disappointment.
Would I Reread It?
Yes, absolutely. This goes on my relisten list without question. I’m a big Kylie Scott fan now and this one is a standout.
Where to Get
📖 Physical Book
Amazon | Bookshop.org
📱 Ebook
Amazon | Bookshop.org
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