laneyofthenight's reviews
664 reviews

Thank You Net Galley for this… interesting book. 

If you ever read the press releases about that Jacob/Renesmee Twilight sequel Stephenie Meyer was writing then shelved and you thought, “damn I wish she’d finish that book” then does Tessa Bailey have the book for you. I’m joking but I’m also not joking. 

This is honestly the only palatable way to do a stepbrother trope. They are both adults the entire time, they were not raised as siblings, they meet before they know they’ll be siblings. They obviously make the stepbrother trope into a big thing for the plot, but I don’t think the trope is my problem with the book. 

This is instalove to a Stephenie Meyer imprinting extreme by an adult, mature man who knows his way around the world on a young (not renesmee young, definitely legal) girl who is completely clueless to the ways of the world and has the mind and maturity and skills of a child but the body of a woman who doesn’t need a lover right now because she’s too mentally young and clueless, and what she needs is a mentor so instead of getting together right from the jump like he wants to he becomes her best friend while also being her stepbrother and there are jumps in time where she seems to grow in maturity and age very quickly until she is appropriately mature to… Look the characters are giving Jacob/Renesmee okay? 

The only saving grace is that they’re so horny and they spend so little time developing as people that you don’t have to dwell on that dynamic very long. I can’t stress how horny and shallow they both are and how little their “love” resembles love. It’s repetitive how much they talk about getting together with no substantive reason for why they want to. 

That said, I was really interested in Chloe’s relationship with her mom and her mentor. The dynamics were really interesting. It felt like it really had the potential to grow into a great plot point and character development if it had just been given a bit more page time. I wish we’d seen more of their dynamic. Similarly, I wish we’d gotten more about Harvey and Sig’s relationship not just centric on Sig trying to break up the parents because that felt like it could’ve added a lot of depth to Sig. There was a lot of potential if we’d just set aside the lust and “it’s so wrong but it feels so right” vibes that Sig and Chloe were giving off for at least a couple pages and tried to write a cohesive story.