Author: autumn_breeze

Genre: Vampire/Romance

What I liked about this book:

This book did so much right. It:

1. Established the relationship between Everett and Thanos as just as important, valid, and normal as the heterosexual relationship between Thanos' parents. Thanos and his family treat Everett as every bit a valid spouse as anyone else's husband.

2. Treated sexual assault with frankness and sensitivity, then treated lying about sexual assault with the same sort of gravity. And even though Everett lied and that was shitty, Thanos never questioned the validity of his claim.

3. NEVER deviated from the theme that consent is important and everyone has a say in how their relationship is going to be, even though Thanos and Everett's marriage was arranged, and Everett was younger than Thanos by a fair bit.

4. Treated Lillith as a cherished and important member of Thanos' family, even though she is severely mentally ill.

This book hit a lot of boxes, boxes I did not expect it to hit when I saw that book come into my inbox with that title. Especially not when I saw that book come into my inbox with that title, and then saw it was about a vampire and a werewolf. I expected something totally different than what I received, and in this case this is a very, very positive thing.

I legitimately enjoyed this book and said 'what the fuck' when I got to the current last chapter. I will probably continue to read it. I super did not expect to be giving a positive review to a book with this subject matter, so good job, Autumn.

What I did NOT like about this book:

The sex scenes are...not great, if I'm going to be flat-out honest, and I could have gone my whole life without reading them. It came off as sort of awkward and cringey. Then again, I tend to say that about most sex scenes and am very very bad at reading them, so the author can take of this what she will. But they didn't seem that well done and I think the book could have done without them entirely. A few were there just as filler, only one was really super important to the plot...but again, I am super not the right person to ask about sex scenes.

The author really needs to learn to format dialogue. When a character is speaking, and then the next line is an action from ANOTHER character, there should be a paragraph break. Otherwise, it is ambiguous who said that line of dialogue. This was a problem many times throughout the book, and although I think a proofreader can fix it, it made me twitch every time I saw it.

A few plot points were filler, and although they were cute, I think the book could have gone without them. Some also just seemed random, though they made a LOT more sense when I got to the end of the book and found out about the thing I'm not going to say because it is a huge, and very well foreshadowed, spoiler.

Although Lillith was portrayed alright, I think her portrayal could have been even better. At one point her bipolar disorder is treated as a sort of offhand joke, and I definitely think we could skip this. I think the author can definitely show she is sick and sometimes difficult without making her the butt of a joke.

Overall:

I really enjoyed this book. There are a few things it could have gotten better, and someone needs to comb through and fix all the incorrectly formatted dialogue, because it is annoying.

Rating: 

8/10. Fix the dialogue, nix the sex scenes and the bipolar joke, and this would have a 9/10 easy. I might even give it a 10/10 on a day where I was feeling very generous. I thoroughly enjoyed it.