Más alto que el deseo [Eyes Turned Skyward] — A Bucket List Romance That Earns Its Tears

Rebecca Yarros wrote a romance novel about a girl with a heart condition who falls for a fighter pilot candidate, and somehow I'm the one who ended up with chest pains.

Let me back up. It was 11 PM on a Tuesday, Jenny was already asleep, and I was meal-prepping lunches for the week — chicken, rice, broccoli, the consultant special — when I figured I'd knock out something from my queue. Más alto que el deseo had been sitting in my Audible library since Jenny added it during her ongoing campaign to "make me feel things that aren't related to quarterly earnings." Nearly 13 hours of Spanish-language new adult romance. Not exactly my wheelhouse. But the Yarros name kept popping up (Fourth Wing people, you know), and the military academy setting grabbed me more than I expected.

Executive Summary: This is a well-executed emotional romance that earns its tears honestly, even if it leans hard into familiar tropes. The dual narration in Spanish elevates the material past what I think the English text alone would deliver.

The General's Daughter and the Guy Who Should Know Better

The setup is classic forbidden romance — Paisley Donovan has a congenital heart condition that killed her sister, and her parents (her father's a military general) have wrapped her in bubble wrap her entire life. She's got a bucket list. Jagger Bateman pulls her out of the ocean early on, and from there it's the expected gravitational pull. He's at an elite flight academy. She's the general's daughter. She already has a boyfriend. Jagger is that boyfriend's rival.

Yarros knows exactly what she's doing with the stakes here. The heart condition isn't just metaphor-bait — it creates genuine tension because you're never sure if Paisley's racing pulse around Jagger is romantic or medical. That's a surprisingly effective device. My parents would've called this "unnecessary drama" and gone back to folding shirts, but I'll admit it works.

What got me was how the overprotective parents arc hit different than expected. I grew up watching my mom and dad pour everything into keeping the business alive, into keeping us safe in a neighborhood that wasn't always easy. The Donovans' suffocating love for Paisley — the way they can't separate protecting her from controlling her — that felt real in a way most romance novels don't bother to earn. Yarros has military family roots and it shows in how she writes the general. He's not a cardboard villain. He's a dad who already buried one daughter.

That same specificity — the kind that only comes from someone who actually lived inside a world — is what made me respect In the Likely Event more than I expected from the same author.

Laura Villalta Carries the Emotional Weight

Two narrators here — Laura Villalta and Gabriel Romero — splitting Paisley and Jagger's perspectives. Villalta is the stronger of the two. She nails Paisley's voice in a way that walks the line between vulnerability and stubbornness without tipping into whiny. There's a breathlessness to her delivery during the bucket-list sequences that mirrors the character's literal cardiovascular reality, and I don't know if that was intentional but it's effective.

Romero is solid. Not spectacular. He handles Jagger's bravado well enough, but some of the emotional confession scenes feel like he's reading them slightly too evenly — like the text is asking for a crack in the voice that doesn't quite come. In Spanish, the rhythm of the romance language naturally adds some heat to the dialogue, which helps. But I wanted more range from him during the third act.

No sound effects, no music, just two narrators trading chapters. Clean production. For 12 hours and 50 minutes of romance, the pacing is... look, it's long. There's at least two hours of will-they-won't-they circling that could've been tightened. My 2.0x speed couldn't save this one — I bumped it down to 1.5x because Villalta's emotional beats needed room to land, and rushing past them felt wrong even to me.

Who Gets the ROI Here (And Who Should Skip)

If you're a Yarros fan who reads in Spanish — or you're working on your Spanish and want something emotionally engaging to immerse in — this delivers. The dual-narrator format justifies the audiobook over text. If you loved Más fuerte que el peligro (the first in this series), the tonal consistency is there. The Colorado Romance Writer's Award this won wasn't charity.

But if you're not already invested in new adult romance tropes — the forbidden love, the bucket list, the brooding pilot — this won't convert you. It's genre-faithful to its bones. And at nearly 13 hours, it asks for a real time commitment that the middle section doesn't always justify. Pure efficiency-seekers and anyone allergic to the slow-burn will-they-won't-they loop — walk away now.

Jenny asked me what I thought when I finished at 1 AM, standing over six perfectly packed meal-prep containers. I said it was "emotionally efficient for its genre." Jenny would say I'm being harsh. Jenny is right. It made me feel things. I'm not happy about it, but the data doesn't lie.

The Consulting Fee

Five hours of this are worth the listen. The other seven? Debatable. But Yarros earns her ending — the final two chapters hit with legitimate force, and Villalta's delivery closes the deal. Skip to chapter 5 if you want to cut past the setup. Thank me later. For a genre I didn't choose to enter, I'm walking away with more than I expected, which is basically the highest compliment a management consultant can give.