Eugh! I disliked this book so intensely! This book comes with a content warning that it is a dark romance however I don’t think the author truly understands what that means because I would not place this book into the category of dark romance. There are multiple problematic elements to the story for me; the fact that the relationship begins by Ellery, our vampire, stalking Wren is questionable however I will accept it as being part of a “dark romance” however the way that he acts in the bedroom in a way that amounts to sexual assault was very much not cool. For the bedroom aspect, what was necessary was a clear establishment of enthusiastic consent for Ellery to behave the way that he did, particularly as it seems that Wren is very much not into this behaviour. There is one scene in particular where Ellery sees Wren with another man and there is no consistency to his thought patterns as he goes back and forth from saying it wasn’t her fault because she was drunk to how dare she be with another man. It just didn’t work. Additionally, in that scene there seems to be a really unselfaware element that Wren was drunk when she was literally just with the other man but because the author wanted Ellery and Wren to bonk, suddenly Wren magically isn’t drunk.

The sex scenes in this book are so bad that I was shocked to discover that the writer of this book was a woman.

My biggest grievance with this book was the fact that there is a graphic on-page depiction of Wren being raped with an implication that this wasn’t the first time that it had happened to her as she was missing for three days and it is stated that hypnotism had been used upon her. The rape scene was really fucking intense and not a pleasant read at all. It also in no way moves the story forward so it is just a fully gratuitous scene. Yuk. Wren then doesn’t really seem to struggle with the emotional impact of what happened to her with her very briefly being touch averse (as in maybe an hour or two) but then immediately wanting to jump straight back into bed with Ellery. She also never acknowledge the lasting psychological damage caused by being hypnotised to have no memory of the previous couple of days. Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticising Wren for being open to have sex on her own terms after what happened to her, recovery and gaining a sense of your body being your own is really important for survivors. The issue is that this is all handled without any kind of due care.

In the acknowledgements, the author says that she wrote this book without any kind of plan and… it shows 😬 Novellas can and do tell a complete story with rich worlds established however there was a sense of things being very rushed and the story being all over the shop. The supernaturals of this world seem to have some intriguing lore to them because this is never fully explored leading to the reader wondering what even was the point. I suspect that the dropping of wider world information is intended to be sequel bait but can we maybe just not?

Overall, the characters of this story didn’t feel fully-realised and it was often difficult to distinguish between the voices of our two characters. This book was just not good.