Dark Romance – Page 3 – Nonfiction and Nonsense

Vipers and Virtuosos by Sav R. Miller

Surprise! It has been a while since I had a bonus Friday blog post. You will probably be getting a few of them this month because I am blowing through this series.

To pick up where I left off, I was right and I love it when I am right! Book two in the Monsters and Muses series was indeed focused on Riley. Little did we know, when the Ricci sisters were gossiping about the disgraced rock star at the diner in Promises and Pomegranates, that we were actually getting a glimpse of the scandal that makes up the plot of the following book. I did not see that coming, but I am pleased with the little piece of information that set up the story for Vipers and Virtuosos.

As much as I liked the story and the characters, I was unfortunately once again faced with my least favorite trope, the virgin. The untouched female in this story was slightly more believable in terms of her character, as she was very unsure and skittish. This made me willing to look past the ick I usually get when I realize the story I’m reading is about a virgin discovering the delights of sex. There are some places in the story where I believe that Riley should have been a little bit more unwilling and afraid when you take into account the events of her past. I won’t spoil that for you, I’ll let you discover it for yourself. I will only say that she experienced an incredibly traumatic event when she was sixteen, and when the events of this story take place it has only been two years since the incident. In my opinion, the horrible experience she went through and the time that had passed since, along with her very young age, would not allow her to be ready to be ready for the type of intimacy that Aiden exposed her to.

We get to see a little bit of Kallum in this story, he is assisting Riley on her journey but I won’t say how. Other than that we pretty much get all new characters. We get to delve a little bit into the world from which Kallum came. So if you were curious about Kallum’s origins, or you just wanted more of him, you get a little bit of his backstory here. Ivers International, the security organization he used to work full time for, is now headed by its namesake Kieran Ivers. Riley’s older brother, Boyd, works at Ivers and is one of the best at what he does for the association.

I think based on the plot of this book we can expect to learn more about Ivers International and the men, and perhaps women, who work there, in future books. At the end of this book, Riley is back In King’s Trace, the town she hailed from, and I feel like more is going to happen there. Perhaps the next book will be about Boyd and Fiona? I was hoping for a book focused on Jonas or Blue, and I can see one or both of Elena’s sisters getting a book as well. There are four more books in this series, so maybe I will be correct on most of these predictions. I am most eager to learn more about the mysterious Blue, the bouncer from Jonas and Kallum bar in Aplana. You’ll see another review from me on Thursday next week.

Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller

Fiction

I can see why the author wrote a prequel for Promises and Pomegranates because you do want to find out more about how the physical relationship between Kallum and Elena began once you start the story. But if you were like me and read the prequel first, Sweet Sin does make you want to invest in that book as is evidenced by me having done just that. That being said, I am glad that I did it backwards in having read the subsequently written prequel first. The end of Sweet Sin makes more sense once you start to read Promises and Pomegranates, it becomes clear that Elena was attacked by Mateo and not a victim of a kidnapping just then. Considering that the affianced pair have a history of beating each other, it’s clear that Mateo attacked her and she blacked out from that.

As for what I thought of the book overall, it was pretty high on my personal scale regarding the spice, so I did like it for that. I did have one thing that made me not enjoy it as much as I think I could have. My big ick in the world of tropes is virginity. Something about mixing virginity with dark romance, and some additional genres, just annoys and irritates me. I find that it makes the story less believable if the main character is a virgin who ends up being immediately very open to anything and everything, isn’t shy or unsure, and is the most amazing sexual partner that the other person has ever been with. No one is that good at anything their first try, that is not how it works. I know it’s fiction, but it just doesn’t ever feel even a little bit convincing to me. Elena happens to tick pretty much all of my boxes for the ick. One she is a virgin who is embarrassingly desperate to lose her virginity to Kallum. During their first encounter she has what in my opinion is entirely too much vigor for someone who is being penetrated for the first time, and doesn’t seem to suffer from the pain and muscle soreness that usually follows the act. In fact, they go back to back to back. The only believable part of this, in my opinion, was that after their last round she immediately fell asleep. All of the above mentioned occurred in Sweet Sin, but the irritation continues in Promises and Pomegranates. Elena has been yearning for Kallum ever since the night they had together which was followed with his disappearance. I have a feeling that if he didn’t return then she would have gone years pining after him before finally giving up and moving on. And in my imagination avoiding being intimate with anyone would have fallen under this desperation of waiting to see if the man would come back to her. There is an abhorrently cringe worthy moment in the book when she refers to herself as the ‘virgin archetype’ in which I actually groaned aloud at. So while I was interested in the story and I did enjoy the spice, in the back of my mind I was always thinking about my least favorite, most hated, trope.

Having gone into this series almost blind, I am very curious about the plot of the next book. Do we get more of Kallum and Elena, or does the story focus around another couple? I have a feeling that we have seen the end of Hades and his Persephone and that we will get an entirely new story in book two. I have a feeling that the next book will be a romance between the very briefly mentioned Riley and a new character. Or I could be very wrong and the next book in this series follows characters that have absolutely no relation to anyone from Promises and Pomegranates. I am eager to finish writing this review so that I can find out. If I wasn’t so adamant about writing a review for a finished book before I start a new book then I would have begun Vipers and Virtuosos already. So, I will be abruptly ending my blog here.

Unrelated, I really liked the way the last picture I took turned out. Seeing as this is the book that the prequel was based off of, I decided to just do the exact same thing. I think it looks just as good and this makes me feel pretty pleased with myself! Also, when I was taking the picture for Sweet Sin it was before I had even opened the book. I had no idea that there would be actual black ribbon involved, that was just a happy coincidence.

Sweet Sin by Sav R. Miller

Fiction

This is pure filth, all sixty eight pages of it. Honestly, I didn’t even need to really bother marking where the spice is, the entire novella is spice. If you have a free thirty minutes and want to read a dirty story, this is it. Besides that, I don’t have much to say. It is a prequel to the six book Monster and Muses series, a little something extra the author wrote for the fans after the masses expressed that they wanted more. I went in completely blind with this, I had no idea what these books were about. I feel like after having read this prequel that I still do not know what I am about to venture into.

I’m wondering if I should have saved this novella for after I read the series, maybe the end would have made a little more sense. I’m not sure if it was alluding to Elena being killed and reincarnated, which seems kind of likely with how much the author mentions Hades and Persephone, or if Elena just gets kidnapped a lot. Maybe it will be a little more clear in a few days as I am starting the first book in the series, Promises and Pomegranates. I hope to have a lot more to report in my next post!

Nocticadia by Keri Lake

Fiction

I absolutely loved this book! I am so excited that I found a dark romance standalone that has substance to go along with the smut. It had everything that I love in a story, a mystery that takes time to unravel, a fair bit of gore, science, and a little bit of drama.

Our main lady, Lilia Vespertine, is an intelligent girl who dreams of being a doctor as she takes one or two classes a semester at a community college while she works full time and then some. Miserable, constantly exhausted, and always worried about money, Lilia thinks it will take her a decade or more before she can reach her dreams, if they are even possible at all. After a professor is very impressed over a paper she wrote, Lilia is given the opportunity to have her dreams come true, with a full scholarship for a semester at a prestigious university. She does the smart thing and leaves her very unfulfilling life behind.

The way the author describes the campus makes me wish it was real and that I was even a little bit qualified to go there. Old, gothic buildings converted into lecture halls, classrooms, and dorms, with the addition of modern structures and modern amenities, on an isolated island that also has a beautiful town. Lilia is one of the few students that is not privileged, making her feel like an imposter as she walks around campus in her second hand clothes and borrowed laptop, surrounded by young people in designer fashions that drink eight dollar coffees. She finds it hard to make friends, never really having had time for them in the past four years, but there is one person that it seems she would make all the time in the world for. That person just happens to be one of her professors, Devryck Bramwell.

He is such an immovable, cold, intelligent character, I was instantly into him. He was pretty much my ideal fictional guy, super smart, driven, with strict self imposed rules that he eventually breaks. He is not nice, and he often speaks cruelly, but when he finds something that he is passionate about he would do anything to protect it, or in this case, her.

If you love a dark tale, with scandal and danger, and dirty, passionate scenes, you will really enjoy this book. I see myself reading this again in the very near future. I almost wish it wasn’t a standalone, I would love to see more of the characters, but the author has said she would not be writing any additional books about Lilia and Devryck. I kind of hope that she changes her mind.

Death by Laura Thalassa

Fiction

This was my favorite book in the series and I am going to gush about it. In the previous three books Death has been described as the worst of the horsemen, and this led me to believe that I would like this tale the most because I always fall for the villain. And there truly is no one more villainous than Thanatos himself. Add to that that the female main character, Lazarus, is something special herself and I couldn’t help favoring this story over all the others. She is not an ordinary mortal woman like the paramores of Pestilence, War, and Famine. From the moment Death meets Lazarus he knows that she has been made specifically for him, as his temptation, his test. This woman does not die from his powers. On top of that, she also cannot be killed by touching his skin as all other mortals do. And every time Death attempts to kill her, she comes back to life in the same way that the horsemen do, healing slowly, regenerating.

Death and Lazarus dance around each other for months in their unique love/hate relationship. Lazarus, like the women before her, is determined to do anything to stop Death and save as many people as she can. Death, the most powerful and stubborn of the horsemen, is determined to succeed where his brothers have failed out of both duty and spite. But succeeding in his purpose would mean the loss of the one thing, the one person he has ever wanted, Lazarus and her love. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it up to you to find out whether or not Thanatos ultimately decided if humanity was worth saving.

One of the big things I really liked about this series was the very vague physical descriptions of the female main characters. With each book I read I wondered if it was intentional. We know that Sara has hazel eyes and brown hair, Miriam has dark brown hair, Ana has curly hair, and we don’t know what Lazarus looks like at all. The physical descriptions diminish with each book and I wonder if it is some kind of metaphor about the four horsemen and the meaning of life. Or it could just be the author’s way of allowing the readers to see themselves as the main character. It is easier to do so when you don’t have a physical description of what they look like.

This is definitely a series that is worth reading and rereading. I know there are a lot of people out there that are skeptical about getting into a book because it is currently popular, but I am telling you that these four are ones that will not disappoint. They are primarily romance novels, dark romance at that, but there is depth in the religious and philosophical tones and themes of loving your fellow man, change, and sacrifice. I would also like to mention that they are some of the most beautiful books that I own. They currently only come in paperback, but the cover art is stunning and the covers have this velvety feel that makes me really enjoy touching them. The font style and size suit the tale, which is something that can make or break a story for me. I can’t wait to have a proper room with a big bookshelf so that I can proudly display them and look at them all the time.