Category: Paranormal & Fantasy Lesbian Romance

Risking Immortality Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Risking Immortality by Alyson Root book cover

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Verdict: The best original vampire premise I have read on Kindle Unlimited this year, attached to prose that four independent reviewers describe in the same unflattering terms — and it is book one of three, rated a good deal lower than the two that follow it.

Best for: Readers who want fated mates written for a sapphic pairing, who care more about worldbuilding than sentences, and who are willing to treat this as the entry point to a series that improves.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — romance.io bands it “Explicit open door”; I Heart SapphFic bands it “Hot & Steamy”; Amazon files it under Lesbian Erotica)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 4.06 Goodreads average across 886 ratings, the lowest of the three books in its own series, marked down because the prose complaint recurs across independent readers)

Tropes: Vampires, fated mates, soulmate deadline, vampire-and-human, forbidden love, bar setting, wealthy clan heiress, bartender heroine, first-person single POV, found family.

What Is Risking Immortality About?

Risking Immortality is the first book in Alyson Root’s paranormal trilogy The Loch & Key, published on 2 September 2024 at 296 pages, and its central idea is a genuinely good one. Vampires here are born, not made. They do not drink human blood. They have spent centuries hiding not because they are monsters but because humans decided they were, and the Loch family has built a business empire of bars and clubs to stay comfortably invisible. Almost every reader who liked this book liked that first, and said so in nearly identical terms.

The engine is a deadline. Amelia Loch must find her fated mate before sunset on her thirtieth birthday or descend into a madness her own family would be obliged to end. She is bookish, reclusive and not looking. Then she meets Erin, a bartender, who is human — and a vampire has never successfully bonded with one.

Nearly two years on it holds 4.06 across 886 Goodreads ratings with 108 written reviews, and 4.5 on Amazon across 765 ratings, where the histogram runs 62 percent five stars, 26 percent four, 11 percent three, 1 percent two and nothing at one. romance.io has it at 4.29 across 18 ratings. It is on Kindle Unlimited, verified on the Amazon listing on 20 August 2026.

One number matters more than any of those. Book two, Waiting for Eternity, averages 4.44 across 424 ratings; book three, Fighting for Infinity, averages 4.46 across 287. This is the lowest-rated book in its own completed trilogy, by a clear margin, and that shapes what it is worth reading for.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

The lore is the reason to read it, and it is doing more than decoration. Making vampires a born species rather than a converted one turns the whole book’s central conflict from a horror problem into a prejudice problem: Amelia is not dangerous, she is hated, and the difference is the point. Readers respond to this specifically — the most common shape of a five-star review here is some version of “forget everything you know about vampires.”

Risking Immortality by Alyson Root book cover

The Loch family is the other thing it gets right. Reviewers name individual relatives — Lucille comes up by name in more than one review — and several single out the fact that Amelia’s family behaves like a family rather than like a gothic institution. In a subgenre that defaults to isolation and menace, warmth is a real differentiator, and it is what carries readers into books two and three.

The deadline structure works too. A hard clock is an unfashionable device and an effective one: it gives a short book urgency without requiring a villain, and it puts a genuine cost on Amelia’s reluctance. At 296 pages the book does not outstay itself, and multiple readers report finishing it in one sitting.

Book Synopsis

Amelia Loch is heir to a vampire clan that has survived by staying out of sight. Vampires in her world are born rather than turned, live on something other than human blood, and have been driven into the shadows by a prejudice that has nothing to do with what they actually are. Amelia, bookish and deliberately unattached, has never minded the distance.

Ancient law gives her until sunset on her thirtieth birthday to find her fated mate. Miss it and she loses her mind — a fate her family would be required to end. Then a sharp-tongued bartender called Erin walks into her life, and Erin is human, which is a bond nobody has managed. Amelia has to decide whether to tell her the truth, and whether love is worth risking an immortality that centuries of prejudice say should never be shared.

My Review

This is a very good idea in search of a better draft, and I say that as someone who wants the idea to win.

The prose is the problem, and it is not a minority quibble dressed up as a theme. Four independent reviewers in a thirty-review sample attack the same target from different angles. Two of them reach for the same word: one calls the book “super wattpad-y” and itemises the smirking and winking; another says outright that it reads as though the author self-published her Wattpad writing. Two more make the craft complaint directly — “too much telling and not enough showing” from one, and a two-star review whose central line is an appeal to the author in capitals to show rather than tell. One of them also flags dialogue that shifts register from page to page. When four readers who otherwise disagree about the book converge on its sentences, that is a finding.

What makes it more pointed is that the Amazon listing credits an editor, Tara Sullivan, by name. This is not a manuscript that went out unread. Whatever the process was, it did not fix what these readers noticed.

The second recurring problem is chemistry, and it is more interesting because it is structural. The fated-mates premise hands the couple their connection before they have earned it, and at least one reader who abandoned the book at 39 percent says exactly that: the bond functions as permission to lust rather than a reason to build anything. She also raises a dynamic several readers found uncomfortable — Erin is attached when Amelia begins pursuing her, and the book does not treat that as a problem the way some readers wanted it to. That is one reader’s DNF and one other reader’s discomfort, so I would not call it consensus. I would call it worth knowing.

Against all of that: the world is original in a way very little in this category is, the family is warm, the book is short, and eighteen of thirty sampled reviews are five stars. Readers who forgive the prose tend to love it without reservation, and a striking number of them went straight on to books two and three — which, on the numbers, is where the series actually lands.

How Spicy Is Risking Immortality?

Four out of five, and the sources agree for once. romance.io bands the steam at 4/5, “Explicit open door.” I Heart SapphFic bands it “Hot & Steamy,” which its own scale defines as full graphic description of sexual acts. Amazon files the Kindle edition under LGBTQ+ Erotica and ranks it #213 in Lesbian Erotica. There is on-page, explicit sex here, and nobody in our sample disputes it.

What the sources do not agree on is the burn. The Goodreads blurb sells this as “a slow-burn sapphic paranormal romance.” I Heart SapphFic tags it Love At First Sight. A five-star reviewer says plainly that it is more a fast burn — she liked it anyway, and notes the characters acknowledge how fast they are moving. And the reader who put the book down at 39 percent did so because the attraction arrived without the connection underneath it.

So if slow burn is the specific thing you came for, this is not that book, whatever the description says. The heat is real and it arrives early, and the fated-mates device is doing the work that a slow burn would otherwise do.

Who Should Read This Book?

Read it if the premise is what sells you — a species-not-a-curse take on vampires, a family that behaves like one, and fated mates written for two women, which is far rarer in sapphic romance than in the M/F shelf it borrowed the trope from. Read it if you have a high tolerance for uneven prose in exchange for an original world. And read it if you intend to continue, because on the ratings this is the trilogy’s weakest entry and the two that follow are substantially better received.

Give it a miss if prose quality is the thing you cannot get past — the complaint here is specific, repeated and easy to verify by reading the sample. Give it a miss if you need a romance to build its connection on the page rather than assert it, because the bond is the mechanism. And do not pick it up for the slow burn.

One note on content. Neither the Amazon listing nor I Heart SapphFic carries an enumerated content-warning list. From the premise and reader accounts, the book turns on institutional prejudice against a species, and on a stated consequence — madness, and a family obliged to end a relative’s life — that hangs over the whole plot. One reader also flags the pursuit of a woman who is already attached. Treat that as reader-compiled rather than publisher-confirmed, and treat the absence of an official list as an absence rather than an all-clear.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The split in our thirty-review Goodreads sample runs eighteen five-star, five four-star, three three-star, three two-star and one abandoned without a rating. Amazon’s histogram is gentler — 62 percent five stars, 1 percent two, none at one — which is the usual gap between a platform where people rate what they finish and one where people write about what they did not.

Praise clusters almost entirely on the worldbuilding. Reviewers describe the vampire lore as unlike anything they have read, single out the Loch family by name, and repeatedly mention finishing the book in a sitting. Several say they went straight to the sequel. The cover also gets mentioned unprompted more than once, which tells you something about how the book is being discovered.

Criticism clusters just as tightly, on the writing. Four readers make craft objections, two of them reaching for the same comparison to unpolished web fiction. A separate strand questions whether the book has a conflict at all once the deadline is set — two reviewers say they finished unsure what the central tension had been.

On the discovery question, this book is better connected than most self-published titles in the cluster. It carries a credited editor, it has been reviewed by The Lesbian Review — a long-running sapphic review site, whose verdict we could not read because the site disallows automated access — and it appears in the I Heart SapphFic database with a full trope and heat classification. A narrator who says she is recording the series has publicly praised the writing, which is worth reading as what it is: an interested party’s opinion, not independent coverage.

There is an audiobook edition, available on Amazon. It is not on Libro.fm — a search of the author’s name there returns one unrelated title of hers and nothing from this series — so this post carries no Libro.fm link, and we cannot verify runtime or narration from a source we trust.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Risking Immortality really a slow burn?

Not by the accounts we can check. The description sells it as slow burn; I Heart SapphFic tags it Love At First Sight; a five-star reviewer calls it a fast burn; and the reader who abandoned it at 39 percent did so because the attraction outran the relationship. The fated-mates premise supplies the connection early by design.

How explicit is it?

Explicit. romance.io rates the steam 4/5 and bands it “Explicit open door”, I Heart SapphFic calls it “Hot & Steamy”, and Amazon shelves the Kindle edition in LGBTQ+ Erotica. There is full on-page sex.

Do I need to read the whole trilogy?

The Loch & Key is complete at three books plus a box set, and the ratings climb sharply: 4.06 here, 4.44 for Waiting for Eternity, 4.46 for Fighting for Infinity. No cliffhanger is reported in our sample for this book. If the world appeals and the prose does not put you off, the series is where the payoff is.

Are the writing complaints serious?

They are specific and they repeat. Four independent reviewers in thirty raise craft objections — telling rather than showing, dialogue that shifts register, a first-person voice two readers found weak, and twice a comparison to unedited web fiction. The listing credits an editor by name, so this is not an unedited manuscript; it is a book whose style a consistent minority of readers dislike. Read the Kindle sample first — this is the kind of complaint you can verify in five minutes.

Is there an audiobook?

There is an audio edition on Amazon. It is not available on Libro.fm, so we have no Libro.fm link for it and cannot confirm narrator or runtime from a source we would cite.

Is it on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes — verified on the Amazon listing on 20 August 2026, alongside a $4.99 purchase price. Kindle Unlimited availability is the publisher’s to change, so check the listing before you plan around it.

If You Loved Risking Immortality, Read These Next

For born-not-made vampires played warm rather than gothic, The Girl Who Bit Me is the obvious next stop — funnier, filthier, and carrying editing complaints of its own. Its sequel She’s My Eternity is the cleaner book and adds a mystery. If you want the same explicit register with a darker world around it, Precious Red Pearls is the pick. More in our paranormal Kindle Unlimited list and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Risking Immortality has the most original vampire premise in this corner of Kindle Unlimited and the most consistently criticised prose. Both things are true, and which one decides it for you is genuinely a matter of what you read for. The world is worth the price of entry, the Loch family is a pleasure, the deadline gives a short book real urgency, and eighteen of thirty sampled readers loved it without qualification. But four of thirty attacked the sentences from four directions, the fated-mates device does the work the relationship should be doing, and the description’s promise of a slow burn is not what anyone appears to have read. Start with the Kindle sample: this is a book whose main flaw is visible in the first chapter, and if it does not bother you there, the trilogy that follows is rated a full four-tenths higher.

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Risking Immortality ranks as an inventive, warm-hearted sapphic vampire romance with a first-rate species premise and a real family at its centre — undercut by prose that a consistent minority of readers find unpolished, a bond that substitutes for chemistry, and a slow-burn claim its own readers contradict, and best treated as the doorway to a trilogy that gets better.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

  • ✓ 4.06 average across 886 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4.5 on Amazon across 765 ratings
  • ✓ Eighteen of thirty sampled reviews are five stars
  • ✓ Lowest-rated book in its own completed trilogy

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Fated mates written for a sapphic pairing, still rare
  • ✓ A hard deadline puts a cost on Amelia’s reluctance
  • ✓ One reader abandoned it at 39 percent for lack of chemistry
  • ✓ Pursuit of an already-attached woman unsettled a second reader

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ The Loch family is named affectionately in multiple reviews
  • ✓ Amelia’s reclusiveness is a real trait, not a pose
  • ✓ Erin’s sharpness lands for most readers
  • ✓ Single first-person POV limits access to half the couple

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.0/5

  • ✓ Short, brisk chapters; many readers finished in one sitting
  • ✓ Two reviewers compare it to unedited web fiction
  • ✓ Two more object to telling rather than showing
  • ✓ Dialogue register shifts, per one reviewer, distractingly

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ Repeated one-sitting finishes reported
  • ✓ Family warmth is the most-cited emotional draw
  • ✓ Several readers went straight to the sequel
  • ✓ Two readers finished unsure what the conflict was

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ romance.io bands the steam “Explicit open door”
  • ✓ I Heart SapphFic bands it “Hot & Steamy”
  • ✓ Amazon shelves it in LGBTQ+ Erotica
  • ✓ Arrives early; the slow-burn billing is not borne out

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

  • ✓ No cliffhanger reported in our sample
  • ✓ Trilogy is complete, so the arc is finishable today
  • ✓ Deadline structure forces a resolution rather than a fade
  • ✓ Two readers questioned what the central tension had been

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ 296 pages makes a revisit cheap
  • ✓ The lore rewards a second pass after books two and three
  • ✓ Box set exists for readers who want the whole arc
  • ✓ The prose objections do not improve on re-reading
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She’s My Eternity Review — Is It Worth Reading?

She's My Eternity by Valerie Hunter book cover

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Verdict: A thousand-year-old vampire professor, a barista who is not what she appears to be, and a rising body count across Manhattan — this is a bigger, more serious book than the one it follows, and it trades a good deal of that book’s filth for a plot.

Best for: Readers who loved The Girl Who Bit Me for its warmth rather than its heat, and who want a vampire romance with a real mystery running underneath it.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — the subtitle says spicy; the only two readers in our sample who quantified it landed at three peppers and “not spicy at all lol”)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.0/5 — a 4.36 Goodreads average across 1,062 ratings, marked down for a characterisation complaint that recurs across independent three-star reviewers)

Tropes: Vampires, hidden identity, professor heroine, dating-app disaster, serial-killer mystery, opposites attract, found family, New York setting, new couple inside an established series.

What Is She’s My Eternity About?

She’s My Eternity is the second book in Valerie Hunter’s paranormal series The Girl Who Bit Me, published on 4 July 2026 at 385 pages, and it does the thing series romance does when it is working: it hands the book to someone else. Aster and Sylvia, the broke immortals of book one, are still here and still funny, but they are supporting cast now. The lead is Yasmine Sokolov — a thousand years old, the richest vampire alive, a professor with effectively unlimited research funding and a mansion facing Central Park — and the one thing a millennium has not got her is a girlfriend.

It has landed harder than the first book did at the same age. Six weeks after release it holds a 4.36 average across 1,062 Goodreads ratings with 113 written reviews, and 4.6 on Amazon across 1,043 ratings, where it sits at #17 in Bisexual Fiction, #24 in Lesbian Fiction and #26 in Lesbian Romance. Book one, seven months out, averages 4.13 across 3,960 ratings. The sequel is smaller and better liked.

The Amazon rating histogram is the number worth pausing on: 71 percent five stars, 23 percent four, 6 percent three, and zero percent at both two and one. Not a rounding-down of a few — no one-star or two-star ratings registered at all. Goodreads, which draws a wider and less self-selecting crowd, records 3 one-star and 16 two-star ratings out of 1,062. Either way, almost nobody who picks this up bounces off it hard.

It is on Kindle Unlimited, verified on the Amazon listing on 20 August 2026.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

The first book’s joke was that immortality is no defence against rent. This one has a quieter idea: that a thousand years of being the most powerful person in every room is its own kind of isolation, and the cure is not more power. Yasmine has solved every problem money and time can solve. Not the one that requires her to be ordinary in front of somebody.

She's My Eternity by Valerie Hunter book cover

So the book puts her on a vampire dating app and lets a dozen bad dates do the work a lesser romance would do with a tragic backstory. It is funny, and it is doing something: by the time Bella Dragomir turns up behind a coffee counter, the reader has watched Yasmine fail at connection often enough that the failure reads as character rather than contrivance.

The second idea is the mystery. A string of vampiric killings moves across New York, and it moves toward Bella. That is a structural choice with teeth in it, because it gives the romance something to be measured against — every scene where Yasmine chooses to believe Bella costs her something. A five-star reviewer lists what she thinks the book gets right and includes “the romance, the communication, the compelling backstory, a propulsive plot.” The communication is worth flagging: several readers single out the fact that these two talk to each other, which in a genre built on withheld information is a deliberate refusal of the easiest available conflict.

And it keeps book one alive: Aster and Sylvia recur, and one reviewer’s entire verdict is that she loves everything to do with Sylvia. That is how a series holds a readership.

Book Synopsis

Yasmine Sokolov has spent a thousand years accumulating everything except company. She is the wealthiest vampire on earth, holds a professorship funded well past the point of oversight, and owns a house across the park from most of Manhattan’s problems. Having moved to New York to help Aster and Sylvia through a change neither of them planned for, she finds herself pushed back onto VampireMatch, where a run of uniformly disappointing dates makes another thousand years alone look less like a fear and more like a forecast.

Then she meets Bella Dragomir, who works behind a coffee counter and is exactly the sort of person Yasmine has spent a millennium learning not to fall for. Meanwhile a series of killings with vampiric signatures works its way across the city, and the pattern keeps bending toward Bella. Yasmine has to decide how much of what she has been told is true.

My Review

This is the better-built book and the less distinctive one, and that trade is the whole story of the sequel.

Better-built is not a small thing. The complaints that dogged book one — spelling errors, dropped words, continuity slipping between chapters — are absent from the reviews here. Nobody in our sample of thirty asks for an editor, and one reader calls the writing beautiful outright. Whatever changed between January and July, it changed.

The plot is a genuine plot rather than a premise, and it carries the book past the halfway mark, which is where a lot of romance sequels start coasting on established affection. The mystery pays off in a reveal that recontextualises Bella substantially, and the readers who liked the book liked that reveal.

What it loses is nerve. Book one was funny and filthy and completely unembarrassed, and a large part of its appeal was that it did not care whether you thought its heroines were nice people. This one wants to be liked. The heat drops — how far is genuinely disputed, and I will come back to it — and the toxicity that made Aster and Sylvia interesting is replaced by two leads who are, mostly, good to each other. That is a legitimate choice and plenty of readers prefer it. It also means the book competes in a much more crowded field.

The recurring criticism, and it comes from readers who otherwise finished, is that the leads do not fully cohere. Two independent three-star reviewers say versions of the same thing: they could not get a grip on who these women were. One describes them as “very one dimensional and sometimes inconsistent” and ties that directly to why the relationship’s build-up did not convince her. The other says plainly that she did not feel she knew the characters, and found the plot long and unfocused. Two voices out of thirty is a minority, not a consensus — but it is the same objection twice over, arrived at separately, and it is aimed at the thing a romance cannot afford to get wrong. A third three-star reader lands somewhere adjacent: she finished unsure the ending had earned its happy-ever-after.

The tonal range is the likely cause. The book runs camp and it runs hard science, sometimes within a few pages, and at least one reader found the combination incoherent rather than playful. If you want a vampire romance that stays in one register, this is not it.

How Spicy Is She’s My Eternity?

The honest answer is that the evidence does not agree with the cover, and I would rather tell you that than pick a number and pretend.

The subtitle on the Amazon listing is A Spicy Sapphic Vampire Romance. Book one carried no such promise and turned out to be one of the most explicit books on the Kindle Unlimited sapphic shelf — romance.io bands it at 5/5, “Explicit and plentiful,” and readers describe it in terms I will not repeat here. This book advertises the heat and, by the accounts we can find, delivers less of it.

There is no romance.io entry for She’s My Eternity, so there is no independent steam rating to check the subtitle against. That leaves reader testimony, and it splits. One three-star reviewer’s assessment is “not spicy at all lol,” offered as one item in a list of disappointments. A five-star reviewer who scores the book formally gives it three peppers out of five. Others use “sexy” without quantifying. Nobody in our sample of thirty describes it the way book one’s readers describe book one.

So: there is on-page sex, written for heat rather than fade-to-black, and it is not the wall-to-wall explicitness of the first book. Three out of five is our reading of the evidence, and it is the least certain number on the scorecard below. If the heat was why you read book one, adjust expectations. If the heat was why you hesitated over it, this is the gentler entry point.

Who Should Read This Book?

Read it if you finished The Girl Who Bit Me wanting more of that world and would take a tighter, cleaner book over a wilder one. Read it if you want a romance with a mystery that functions as a mystery, and if a heroine who is competent, wealthy and lonely in an interesting way appeals more than a heroine who is a disaster. Read it if editing standards matter to you, because on that measure this is a different production from its predecessor.

Approach with more care if you need your leads sharply drawn, because that is where the dissent clusters. Approach with care if you want tonal consistency — the swings between comedy and hard scientific detail are wide and deliberate. And approach with care if you are reading for spice specifically, because the subtitle is doing more work than the text.

One further caution, and it comes from a reader rather than the publisher. Bella’s history involves centuries of marriages she did not want and did not survive her way out of by kindness, and a three-star reviewer argues the book moves past it too quickly. See the content-warnings question below; neither the Amazon listing nor the Goodreads description flags any of it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The enthusiasm is the loudest signal. Across our thirty-review sample the split runs fifteen five-star, ten four-star, five three-star and nothing below. The five-star reviews are not measured — one reader announces this is the first serious review she has written for anything. Multiple readers say the same thing in capitals: they want more, immediately.

The recurring praise is for the mystery and the emotional intelligence rather than the fangs: the communication between the leads, the backstory work, the scientific thread under the romance, the fact that the plot keeps moving. Several readers stayed up too late finishing it. Aster and Sylvia also get named affectionately in reviews otherwise about somebody else entirely — a good sign for the series, a slightly awkward one for the new couple.

The criticism is narrow and consistent: characterisation, pacing and tonal control, in that order. It is also polite. Nobody is angry. The three-star reviews read like readers who wanted to like it more than they did, which is a different and more useful signal than readers who feel cheated.

What is missing matters too. There is no trade coverage, no blog reviews we could find, and no Reddit discussion. The publisher’s own blurb calls this the next installment of a “TikTok-viral sapphic vampire sensation,” and TikTok does return a topic page for the series — but the videos we could actually identify are posted from the author’s own account, and TikTok blocks automated reading of the topic page, so we cannot verify how much of that virality is readers and how much is marketing. Two reviewers in our sample disclose that they received advance copies. None of this is disqualifying; it is simply the shape of a self-published book that is selling well without institutional attention, and discovery here is plainly running through Amazon category ranks and word of mouth from book one.

One more absence: the blurb ends by telling you to preorder the next installment. As of 20 August 2026 there is no third book listed on Amazon under this author and none on the Goodreads series page, which shows two. Take the promise as intent rather than a date.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to read The Girl Who Bit Me first?

Yes, in practice. The central romance stands on its own, but Yasmine arrives in New York specifically to help Aster and Sylvia through a development book one sets up, and those scenes are written for readers who already care about them. Starting here would work; it would also waste the series.

How spicy is She’s My Eternity compared to book one?

Less, on the available evidence, despite this being the book that puts “Spicy” in its subtitle. Book one is rated 5/5 for steam on romance.io. This one has no romance.io entry, and the two readers in our sample who quantified the heat gave it three peppers and “not spicy at all” respectively. There is on-page sex; there is not the relentlessness of the first book.

Does it end on a cliffhanger?

No cliffhanger is reported in our sample. The central couple resolve, and the mystery closes. One three-star reader was not convinced the happy ending had been earned, which is a different complaint. The blurb points toward a further installment, but nothing in the reviews suggests this book withholds its own conclusion.

Are there content warnings?

Not enumerated. Neither the Amazon listing nor the Goodreads description carries a content or trigger warning list. From reader accounts the book involves a series of killings with on-page consequences, blood-drinking as a matter of course, and a backstory for one of the leads involving centuries of unwanted marriages that ended in her killing her husbands, with sexual coercion strongly implied. Treat that as reader-compiled rather than publisher-confirmed, and treat the absence of an official list as an absence rather than an all-clear.

Is there an audiobook?

Not on Libro.fm. A search of the title returns nothing, and a search of the author’s name returns no titles by her at all — the same result as for book one. If an audio edition exists elsewhere we could not verify it.

Is it on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes — verified on the Amazon listing on 20 August 2026, alongside a $4.99 purchase price and a $16.99 paperback. As always, Kindle Unlimited availability is the publisher’s to change, so check the listing before you plan around it.

If You Loved She’s My Eternity, Read These Next

Start with the obvious one: The Girl Who Bit Me, which is funnier, filthier and considerably rougher around the edges — read our review first if editing standards are a dealbreaker. Twisted Sorcery is the pick if the urban-supernatural-New-York register is what you came for and you want it darker. Precious Red Pearls is the vampire romance to read when you want the heat this book steps back from. More in our paranormal Kindle Unlimited list and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

She’s My Eternity is the rare sequel that fixes what people complained about and loses something in the repair. The manuscript is clean, the plot is real, the leads talk to each other like adults, and a thousand-year-old vampire professor failing at dating apps is a genuinely good comic engine. Set against that: a heat level the subtitle oversells, two careful readers who never got a grip on who the leads were, and a tonal swing between camp and laboratory that not everyone will ride. It is the better-made book. Book one is the more memorable one. Most readers who come to this from the first will be glad they did, and the Kindle Unlimited listing makes it a cheap way to find out — and the ones who come for the spice specifically should know what they are getting.

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, She’s My Eternity ranks as a warm, well-plotted urban vampire romance with a mystery that carries its weight and a heroine worth the millennium she has been given — cleaner and more controlled than its predecessor, softer than its subtitle promises, and held back by leads that a consistent minority of readers found underdrawn.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 4.0/5

  • ✓ 4.36 average across 1,062 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4.6 on Amazon across 1,043 ratings
  • ✓ Zero one-star or two-star ratings on Amazon
  • ✓ Characterisation questioned by independent three-star readers

Romance ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

  • ✓ Readers repeatedly praise the communication between the leads
  • ✓ A dozen failed dates earn the connection when it arrives
  • ✓ The mystery forces the trust to cost something
  • ✓ One reader found the build-up unconvincing

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

  • ✓ Yasmine’s competence and loneliness are a strong pairing
  • ✓ Aster and Sylvia return and readers name them fondly
  • ✓ Called one-dimensional and inconsistent by a three-star reviewer
  • ✓ A second reader could not tell who the leads were

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.0/5

  • ✓ Book one’s editing complaints do not recur here
  • ✓ At least one reader calls the writing beautiful
  • ✓ Nobody in our thirty-review sample asks for an editor
  • ✓ Camp and hard science alternate; one reader found it incoherent

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

  • ✓ Fifteen of thirty sampled reviews are five stars
  • ✓ Multiple readers report staying up late to finish
  • ✓ One reviewer’s first serious review of anything
  • ✓ Effect depends on having read book one

Heat Level ★★★☆☆ 3/5

  • ✓ On-page sex written for heat, not fade-to-black
  • ✓ One reader scores it three peppers out of five
  • ✓ Another says it is not spicy at all
  • ✓ No romance.io entry; the subtitle is unverified

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

  • ✓ No cliffhanger reported in our sample
  • ✓ Romance and mystery both close
  • ✓ One reader unconvinced the happy ending was earned
  • ✓ Blurb promises an installment not yet listed anywhere

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4.0/5

  • ✓ The mystery rewards a second pass once the reveal is known
  • ✓ 385 pages is a manageable revisit
  • ✓ Series cast carries across both books
  • ✓ No audio edition to alternate with
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1

The Girl Who Bit Me Review — Is It Worth Reading?

The Girl Who Bit Me by Valerie Hunter book cover

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Verdict: Six-hundred-year-old vampires defeated by New York rent, an accidental bite that turns best friends into something else, and some of the highest heat on Kindle Unlimited — inside a book that multiple readers say was published without a proper edit.

Best for: Readers who want funny, filthy, toxic vampires and a friends-to-lovers turn with teeth in it, and who can read past spelling errors, missing words and continuity slips.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — romance.io bands it “Explicit and plentiful”; one reader calls it vampire porn with a little plot, approvingly)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 4.13 Goodreads average across 3,959 ratings, marked down because the editing complaint recurs across independent reviewers)

Tropes: Vampires, friends to lovers, six centuries of friendship, accidental bond, blood bond, broke immortals, con premise, toxic dynamic, found family, New York setting.

The Girl Who Bit Me is the first book in Valerie Hunter’s paranormal series of the same name, published in January 2026, and its premise is a joke that turns out to be load-bearing: two ancient vampires who have survived inquisitions, wars and the industrial revolution are finally beaten by Manhattan rental prices.

It has moved fast. Seven months after release it has 3,959 Goodreads ratings with 577 written reviews, 2,057 on Amazon at 4.5, a top-ten Kindle rank in both Lesbian Fiction and Lesbian Romance, and a sequel already out. It is also a genuinely divided book, and the division is not about taste.

What Is The Girl Who Bit Me About?

This is comic paranormal romance built on a genuinely good joke: immortality is not much use against a housing market. Aster and Sylvia have six hundred years of shared history and no money, and the book gets a great deal of mileage out of treating ancient vampires as broke flatmates with a week left on a lease. The comedy is the delivery mechanism; underneath it is a friends-to-lovers story with six centuries of accumulated intimacy behind it.

Aster Castelmar is introduced through force — she is the raw strength of the pair, and the one the plan depends on when it needs a threat. Sylvia Maroven is introduced through charm, which is the other half of the con they are running: enthrall a billionaire, solve the money problem, keep the arrangement between the two of them exactly as it has always been. The bite that changes everything is not a plot device deployed at a dramatic moment. It is a joke between friends that turns out to have consequences neither of them knew were possible.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

  • The premise is actually funny: Vampires defeated by New York rent is a real comic idea, and the book commits to it rather than using it as a hook and abandoning it.
  • Six centuries of friendship as the foundation: The friends-to-lovers turn has an unusually long runway, and readers who love the book say the history is why the bond lands.
  • The heat is exceptional: romance.io puts it in the top band, and one Amazon reviewer’s summary — vampire porn with a little plot, offered as praise — tells you exactly what proportion of the book is what.
  • Toxic without apology: Readers describe the dynamic as a guilty pleasure and mean it; the book does not clean these two up.
  • It found its audience immediately: Nearly 4,000 Goodreads ratings and a top-ten category rank inside seven months, with a sequel already published.

Book Synopsis

Aster Castelmar and Sylvia Maroven have been inseparable for six hundred years. They have outlasted inquisitions, wars, collapsing empires and the arrival of industry, and none of it has separated them. What has finally cornered them is a New York lease with a week left to run and no money to replace it. Immortality, it turns out, does not come with an income.

The plan they arrive at is a con with vampiric assistance: enthrall a billionaire, and let Sylvia’s charm and Aster’s strength do the rest. On paper it is foolproof, which is the kind of thing people say before something goes wrong in a way nobody anticipated.

What goes wrong is a bite. Sylvia bites Aster — a joke between two people who have been everything to each other for six centuries, a fleeting thrill, nothing that was supposed to mean anything. Instead it wakes an ancient bond neither of them knew could exist between them, and the six hundred years of friendship they have carefully maintained turns out to have been standing on something else the entire time.

My Review

The joke at the centre of this book is better than most paranormal romance manages in three hundred pages. Ancient vampires who have survived the fall of empires and cannot survive a rent increase is genuinely funny, and Hunter does not treat it as a hook to be discarded on page twenty — the poverty is the plot, the con follows from it, and the bite happens because these two are living on top of each other in a flat they are about to lose. That is structure, not whimsy.

The Girl Who Bit Me by Valerie Hunter book cover

The heat is the other thing it does exceptionally. romance.io bands it at the top, and the most useful description comes from a five-star Amazon reviewer who calls it basically vampire porn with a little plot — and immediately says she is not complaining. That is an accurate expectation-setter. If you want a vampire romance where the explicit content is the main business rather than punctuation, this is one of the most generous on Kindle Unlimited.

The problem is the text itself, and it comes from too many independent directions to discount. One reviewer lists grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, missing words and plot holes. Another says the editing needs a lot of work, that the author forgets details established earlier, that the pacing lurches, and that some passages are simply confusing. A third finds the plot holes too large to ignore while saying, in the same review, that she loved the book. This is not a taste disagreement. It is a manuscript that went out before it was finished, and readers who otherwise enjoy it keep saying so.

There is a second, subtler charge worth reporting because it is about craft rather than typos. One reviewer says she never believed these two were centuries old — not their history, not their competence, not that they were clever enough to have survived that long. She attributes the flatness to the book’s origins, having read elsewhere that it began as fan fiction, and argues that the characters lean on the reader importing personality from somewhere else. We could not verify that origin claim and are not repeating it as fact. But her craft observation stands on its own and it is the most substantial criticism in the discourse: six hundred years of history is asserted more often than it is demonstrated.

One small oddity several readers note: the book censors the word porn while containing a great deal of explicit content, which is the kind of inconsistency that pulls a reader out at precisely the wrong moment.

My honest note: A very funny premise and a very generous heat level in a book that needed one more pass and did not get one. If typos will not stop you, the vampires are worth it.

Element In The Girl Who Bit Me
Central relationship Aster Castelmar & Sylvia Maroven — inseparable vampire best friends of six hundred years, undone by one bite
Core tropes Vampires, friends to lovers, accidental blood bond, broke immortals, con premise, toxic dynamic
Setting Contemporary New York — specifically its rental market, which is the actual antagonist of the first act
Heat level 5/5 — explicit and plentiful, and a large proportion of the book
Series The Girl Who Bit Me book 1 of 2; the sequel She’s My Eternity follows different leads
Content notes Vampire feeding and violence, a manipulative con involving hypnosis and consent, a toxic central dynamic, explicit sexual content. No published content-warning list exists for this title

How Spicy Is The Girl Who Bit Me?

Five out of five, and the proportions matter as much as the band. romance.io files it as “Explicit and plentiful” across 30 ratings, and the clearest reader description — from a positive review — is that this is essentially vampire porn with a little plot attached. That is not a criticism in her hands and it should not be one in yours: the book is transparent about what it is prioritising, and the biting and the sex are entangled by design.

The element worth flagging in advance is the con. The plan the two leads execute involves vampiric hypnosis on a human target, which is a consent problem the book plays for comedy rather than examining. No reviewer raises it as an objection, but if coercion used lightly bothers you, it is there. For the same band on the site, Precious Red Pearls is the darker vampire option, and At Her Service is 5/5 contemporary with the negotiation this book does not bother with.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want vampires who are funny before they are frightening, you read for heat above all, a six-century friendship turning is your ideal setup, and you can read past an unedited manuscript.

You may want to skip it if: spelling errors and continuity slips ruin a book for you, you want six hundred years of history demonstrated rather than asserted, plot holes bother you, or you would rather the con’s consent implications were taken seriously.

In short: one of the funniest and filthiest vampire romances on Kindle Unlimited, and one of the least edited.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

This book has had a fast, large reception: 3,959 Goodreads ratings against 577 written reviews and 2,057 on Amazon at 4.5, seven months after release, holding a top-ten Kindle rank in both Lesbian Fiction and Lesbian Romance. There is no trade coverage, no StoryGraph community data visible, and no audiobook on Libro.fm despite one being advertised elsewhere. The sequel, She’s My Eternity, arrived within six months and follows a different couple with Aster and Sylvia in support — which tells you the series is being built around the world rather than around this pair.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The premise, first — broke immortals versus the New York rental market is repeatedly named as the thing that sold them. Second, the heat, which is described in enthusiastic and unambiguous terms. Third, the toxicity: readers call these two a guilty pleasure and clearly enjoy that the book does not redeem them. Fourth, the friendship’s length, which gives the turn a weight a shorter history could not. And fifth, momentum — several reviewers report finishing it in a sitting.

What readers argue about and complain about: The editing, above everything, and from readers who liked the book. One lists grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, missing words and plot holes. Another says the author forgets details established earlier, that the pace lurches, and that stretches are simply confusing. A third says the plot holes are too large to ignore while stating outright that she loved it. Second, characterisation: at least one reviewer never believed these two were six hundred years old or clever enough to have survived it, and found them flat. Third, small but repeatedly noted: the book censors the word porn while being extremely explicit, which readers find jarring. The pattern is clear — almost nobody dislikes what this book is, and a substantial minority is frustrated by how carelessly it was finished.

The series question worth asking first: This is book one of two so far, and no reviewer in our sample reports a cliffhanger. The sequel, She’s My Eternity, moves to a new couple — a thousand-year-old vampire professor and a human barista — with Aster and Sylvia present but not central, so it functions as a companion rather than a continuation. It currently rates higher, at 4.36 against this book’s 4.13, which suggests the author is improving faster than her readership is growing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does The Girl Who Bit Me end on a cliffhanger?

No reviewer in our sample reports one. It opens a series, and the sequel follows a different couple with these two in support.

How explicit is The Girl Who Bit Me?

A 5/5. romance.io bands it “Explicit and plentiful”, and one positive reviewer describes it as vampire porn with a little plot.

Are the editing problems really that bad?

Multiple independent reviewers report spelling errors, missing words, forgotten details and plot holes — and most of them still liked the book. Judge by how much that kind of thing costs you.

Do I need to read this before She’s My Eternity?

Not strictly. The sequel centres a new couple, with Aster and Sylvia in supporting roles, so it works as a companion.

Is there an audiobook?

Not on Libro.fm. An audio edition is referenced elsewhere, but we could not confirm one there.

Is it on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes, verified on the Amazon product page. Kindle Unlimited availability changes without notice, so check the listing before you rely on it.

If You Loved The Girl Who Bit Me, Read These Next

Precious Red Pearls is the vampire pick if you want the same 5/5 heat played dark rather than comic. Twisted Sorcery shares the urban-vampire setting with a better-built city and more editing problems of its own. And She Came from the Swamp is the short-form option if the non-human element is the whole draw. More in our paranormal Kindle Unlimited list and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

The Girl Who Bit Me sets out to be funny and filthy about immortality, and on both counts it succeeds better than almost anything in the category: broke six-hundred-year-old vampires versus Manhattan rent is a genuinely good idea, the con follows from it, and the heat is as generous as anything on Kindle Unlimited. What it does not have is a finished manuscript — spelling errors, missing words, forgotten details and plot holes, reported by readers who liked it anyway — or six centuries of history demonstrated rather than claimed. Nearly four thousand readers have decided that trade is worth it. Check The Girl Who Bit Me on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Girl Who Bit Me ranks as a comic high-heat vampire romance with a first-rate premise — funny, filthy and completely unrepentant, held back by a manuscript that went out unedited and a six-century history it asserts more than it shows, and best approached for the joke and the heat rather than the craft.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ 4.13 average across 3,959 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4.5 on Amazon across 2,057 ratings
  • ✓ Top-10 Kindle rank in two categories
  • ✓ Editing complaints from readers who liked it

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

  • ✓ Six centuries of friendship as foundation
  • ✓ The bite reframes everything retroactively
  • ✓ Toxic dynamic left unredeemed
  • ✓ History asserted more than demonstrated

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

  • ✓ Aster and Sylvia clearly differentiated
  • ✓ Comic register suits both of them
  • ✓ Con premise gives them something to do
  • ✓ One reviewer never believed their age at all

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5

  • ✓ Premise executed with real comic control
  • ✓ Poverty plot properly load-bearing
  • ✓ Momentum strong enough to finish in a sitting
  • ✓ Spelling errors, missing words, forgotten details

Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Six-hundred-year bond gives the turn weight
  • ✓ Precarity is funny and genuinely bleak
  • ✓ Readers report finishing in one sitting
  • ✓ Flat characterisation blunts it for some

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

  • ✓ romance.io: “Explicit and plentiful”
  • ✓ Called vampire porn, approvingly, by a fan
  • ✓ Feeding and sex entangled by design
  • ✓ Consent implications of the con unexamined

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

  • ✓ No cliffhanger reported in our sample
  • ✓ Series continues with a new couple
  • ✓ Bond resolved rather than deferred
  • ✓ Plot holes called too large to ignore

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Premise still funny on a second pass
  • ✓ Short enough to revisit
  • ✓ Sequel already available
  • ✓ No audio edition; the errors do not improve
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2

Twisted Sorcery Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Twisted Sorcery by Kira Adler book cover

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Verdict: A vampire-and-witch urban fantasy with a genuinely good city behind it and more plot than its 260 pages can hold — readers keep saying the same thing, that it had every ingredient and needed room to use them.

Best for: Readers who want dark urban fantasy with a survival premise rather than a chosen-one one, who like worldbuilding, and who will forgive subplots that get introduced and then quietly dropped.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — romance.io bands it “Explicit open door”; the cover subtitle promises dark and steamy)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.98 Goodreads average across 1,163 ratings, marked down because every three-star review identifies the same structural problem)

Tropes: Vampire and witch, urban fantasy, newly turned, abusive ex, survival and desperation, blood bond, morally grey city, forbidden magic, series opener, dark paranormal romance.

Twisted Sorcery is the first book in Kira Adler’s paranormal Midnight City series, published in September 2023, and it opens with a woman two months into being a vampire she did not choose to become, broke and starving, walking into a club where the wealthy buy their darkest fantasies because she has run out of other options.

The numbers are solid: 3.98 on Goodreads across 1,163 ratings with 104 written reviews, 4.4 on Amazon across 833, and 4.29 on romance.io. What makes this book worth a careful read of the discourse is how uniform the criticism is — the three-star reviews are not disagreeing with each other, they are all describing one thing.

What Is Twisted Sorcery About?

This is urban fantasy where being supernatural has made the protagonist’s life materially worse, which is a better starting position than the genre usually chooses. Deni is not powerful and secretly special; she is two months into an involuntary transformation, unemployed, hungry in a way that is both literal and dangerous, and closer to the street than to any destiny. Midnight City is written as a place with an economy and a hierarchy rather than as atmosphere.

Deni is introduced through what has been taken from her — including by the ex who turned her, and the book is direct that the relationship was abusive. Celeste is introduced through power and appetite: a witch whose blood is described as honey-sweet, which in a book about a starving vampire is not a compliment so much as a hazard. Elysium, where the wealthy pay to have their fantasies met, is where the two of them collide, and the transaction underneath that meeting is what the romance has to work its way out of.

What Makes This Dark Sapphic Paranormal Romance Work

  • The city: Worldbuilding is the most consistently praised element — even critical reviewers open with it before getting to their complaints.
  • A survival premise, not a destiny one: Deni’s desperation is economic as well as supernatural, which gives the opening real stakes.
  • The dynamic between the leads: A vampire who needs blood and a witch whose blood is unusually desirable is a clean, charged engine, and readers say they were intrigued by it immediately.
  • It does not soften the ex: The abusive relationship that produced Deni’s condition is treated as damage rather than as backstory colour.
  • Ambition: This book is trying to do a great deal — multiple subplots, a whole city, a magical economy — and the reviews that criticise it do so from a position of wanting more of it, not less.

Book Synopsis

Two months ago Deni was a person with a life. Then the woman she was with turned her, and Midnight City has spent every week since taking the rest. She has no money, no work she can safely do, and a hunger that is not a metaphor. The gap between where she is and being on the street is narrow enough to measure in days.

Elysium is where the wealthy go to have their darkest appetites met, professionally and for a price. It is not a place Deni would have chosen; it is the place her situation has produced. What she is looking for there is a way to keep existing, and she is not in a position to be careful about the terms.

Celeste is a witch with real power and blood that Deni can smell across a room — honey-sweet, the description goes, which for a starving vampire is closer to a threat than a temptation. She is also, potentially, the thing that changes Deni’s trajectory. What forms between them starts as need on one side and interest on the other, in a city where both of those are currencies, and neither woman is in a position to pretend the transaction is not part of it.

My Review

The world is the best thing here and readers are unanimous about it. Midnight City has an economy, a class structure and a magical underworld with rules, and Elysium is a genuinely good invention — a place where supernatural appetite has been commodified, which gives the book somewhere real to put its premise. A critical Amazon reviewer opens with very good world building before saying anything else, which is the clearest signal available that this part works.

Twisted Sorcery by Kira Adler book cover

The premise is also well chosen. Making the vampire poor is the move: Deni is not powerful, she is precarious, and the hunger is entangled with rent and food and having nowhere to go. A supernatural romance where the supernatural element has made someone’s life materially worse has stakes that a chosen-one story cannot manufacture.

The problem is arithmetic, and every three-star review states it in slightly different words. One says the story was convoluted, with subplots distracting from the main thread. Another says the book had all the ingredients to be truly awesome but needed more fleshing out, and that the interesting subplots get lost in the shortness of it. A third says she was intrigued at first and stopped being invested somewhere in the middle. At 260 pages, this novel is carrying a city, a magical system, an abusive-ex plot, an economy of appetite and a romance, and something has to give. What gives is the connective tissue.

Two more specific charges from Amazon’s critical reviews. One reader found the romance itself rushed and out of nowhere — that she could admire the world but never fell in love with the couple. Another objects to the resolution: that a betrayal is dismissed too easily and the answer to every conflict is wrapped in a bow of true love, which she calls sad and flat. The same reviewer reports a lot of typos and says the book needed more editing. Those are distinct problems, but they share a cause — a book moving faster than its own material.

Content deserves a flag the publisher does not give. A reader-compiled warning list for this book names consent issues, drug addiction and an attempted sexual assault on the page. None of that is in the product description, which promises dark and steamy and leaves it there.

My honest note: A very good world in a book that is a hundred pages too short to live in it. Read it for Midnight City and Elysium; do not expect the romance or the subplots to be finished.

Element In Twisted Sorcery
Central relationship Deni & Celeste — a newly turned vampire two months into destitution, and a powerful witch whose blood she can smell across a room
Core tropes Vampire and witch, urban fantasy, newly turned, abusive ex, survival, transactional meeting, magical underworld
Setting Midnight City and the Elysium clubs, where the wealthy pay to have their darkest fantasies met
Heat level 4/5 — explicit open door, with the cover promising dark and steamy
Series Midnight City book 1; readers report loose ends but say it reads as a standalone
Content notes Compiled by a reader, not the publisher: consent issues, drug addiction, an attempted sexual assault on the page, an abusive past relationship, explicit sexual content

How Dark and Spicy Is Twisted Sorcery?

Four out of five on heat. romance.io bands it “Explicit open door” across 14 ratings, and the book’s own subtitle sells it as dark and steamy. The explicit content is present and consistent with that band; nobody in the reviews disputes it in either direction.

Darkness is where the publisher does less than it should. The listing offers the word dark and no detail. A reader-compiled warning list names consent issues, drug addiction and an attempted sexual assault written on the page, alongside an abusive past relationship that is central to the premise. That is a meaningful gap between what a buyer is told and what is in the book — the same pattern we found in Vibe, though this book is considerably less extreme. For comparable heat on the site, She Came from the Swamp is 4/5 in a shorter paranormal frame, and Precious Red Pearls is the 5/5 vampire pick.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read urban fantasy for the world as much as the couple, you want a supernatural protagonist whose condition has ruined rather than elevated her, and you are happy to start a series knowing threads are left open.

You may want to skip it if: you need subplots resolved, you want the romance to be the centre rather than one element among several, typos pull you out of a book, or an attempted assault on the page is something you need warned about in advance.

In short: an excellent city and an unfinished book inside it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

This is a healthy series opener: 1,163 Goodreads ratings against 104 written reviews, 833 on Amazon with 12 per cent at three stars, and 14 ratings on romance.io. There is no trade coverage, no StoryGraph community data visible, and no audiobook edition on Libro.fm. The striking feature of the discourse is its consistency — the positive reviews praise the same thing and the critical reviews criticise the same thing, with very little scatter in either direction.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The worldbuilding, first and by a distance, named even inside negative reviews. Second, the premise: a broke, starving, newly turned vampire is a starting position readers respond to. Third, the dynamic — a vampire and a witch whose blood is a temptation is a clean engine and reviewers say they were intrigued from the first meeting. Fourth, the darkness itself, which readers who wanted a dark paranormal report getting. And fifth, the pairing of a bisexual witch and a lesbian vampire, which more than one reviewer notes with pleasure.

What readers argue about and complain about: Length against ambition, and almost nothing else. One reviewer calls the story convoluted, with subplots distracting from the main thread. Another says it had all the ingredients to be truly awesome but needed fleshing out, and that the subplots get lost in the shortness of the book. A third lost investment in the middle and found the writing bland from there. On Amazon, one reader admired the world but says the romance felt rushed and out of nowhere, and another objects that a betrayal is dismissed too easily with everything resolved by true love — and reports a lot of typos. It is a rare case where the criticism is essentially a single note played by five people.

The series question worth asking first: This opens Midnight City. Readers report loose ends at the close but say it can be read as a standalone, which is a fair description of a book that introduces more than it finishes. If unresolved threads irritate you, that is the thing to weigh — not a cliffhanger, but a deliberate leaving-open that a longer book would not have needed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Twisted Sorcery end on a cliffhanger?

Not a cliffhanger, but readers report loose ends. It opens the Midnight City series and reviewers say it can be read as a standalone with threads left open.

What are the content warnings for Twisted Sorcery?

The publisher gives none beyond the word dark. A reader-compiled list names consent issues, drug addiction, an attempted sexual assault on the page, and an abusive past relationship.

How explicit is Twisted Sorcery?

A 4/5. romance.io bands it “Explicit open door” and the subtitle sells it as dark and steamy.

Is the romance the main plot?

Not entirely, and that is the most common criticism. The book carries several subplots alongside the romance, and readers say the connective tissue suffers at 260 pages.

Is there an audiobook?

Not on Libro.fm, and we found no audio edition listed.

Is it on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes, verified on the Amazon product page. Kindle Unlimited availability changes without notice, so check the listing before you rely on it.

If You Loved Twisted Sorcery, Read These Next

Precious Red Pearls is the vampire pick at 5/5 heat, played straight and at novella length. She Came from the Swamp shares the same short-form paranormal problem — a good idea with no room. And Her Spell That Binds Me is where to go for witches at full novel length with the atmosphere this book keeps reaching for. More in our paranormal Kindle Unlimited list and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Twisted Sorcery sets out to build a supernatural city where being a vampire has made someone poor rather than powerful, and the city is genuinely good — Midnight City and Elysium are the parts readers name first, including the readers who did not enjoy the book. What it does not have is room. Five separate reviewers describe the same failure in different words: subplots introduced and lost, a romance that arrives too fast, a betrayal dismissed too easily, an ending tied off with true love. This is a novel that needed to be four hundred pages and is two hundred and sixty. Check Twisted Sorcery on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Twisted Sorcery ranks as an over-packed urban fantasy romance with a first-rate setting — inventive and genuinely dark about what its premise costs, held back by carrying more plot than its page count can finish, and best approached for Midnight City rather than for the love story inside it.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

  • ✓ 3.98 average across 1,163 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4.4 on Amazon across 833 ratings
  • ✓ Worldbuilding praised in every register
  • ✓ Five reviewers describe one structural fault

Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

  • ✓ Vampire-and-witch dynamic is a clean engine
  • ✓ Transactional meeting gives it real friction
  • ✓ Readers intrigued from the first scene
  • ✓ Called rushed and out of nowhere by critics

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Deni’s precarity is concrete and specific
  • ✓ Abusive ex treated as damage, not colour
  • ✓ Bi witch and lesbian vampire pairing noted warmly
  • ✓ Supporting cast lost among subplots

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ Midnight City rendered with real texture
  • ✓ Elysium a genuinely good invention
  • ✓ Dark register sustained throughout
  • ✓ Typos and editing gaps reported

Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ Hunger written as poverty, not power
  • ✓ Survival stakes land early
  • ✓ Attempted assault handled seriously
  • ✓ Investment fades in the middle for several readers

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ romance.io: “Explicit open door”
  • ✓ Cover promises dark and steamy, and delivers
  • ✓ Blood and appetite used as charge
  • ✓ Content warnings left entirely to readers

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5

  • ✓ No cliffhanger reported
  • ✓ Readable as a standalone
  • ✓ Series continues in Midnight City
  • ✓ Betrayal dismissed too easily, per critics

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ World rewards a second visit
  • ✓ Short enough to revisit easily
  • ✓ Series opener with threads to follow
  • ✓ No audio edition; subplots unresolved
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1

Let Me Be Yours Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Let Me Be Yours by Lily X book cover

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Verdict: The most substantial sapphic omegaverse romance on Kindle Unlimited — 493 pages of grief, arranged marriage and worldbuilding with genuine disability representation — carried by an Alpha lead whose passivity is the one thing readers cannot forgive.

Best for: Readers curious about omegaverse in a sapphic register, who want a long fantasy romance with a mating-bond mythology taken seriously, and who can tolerate a protagonist who is slow to notice what is happening to the woman she has married.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — romance.io bands it “Explicit open door”, with the heat concentrated rather than constant)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — a 4.17 Goodreads average across 1,321 ratings, with a small dissent that lands on the same character both times)

Tropes: Omegaverse, alpha and omega, arranged marriage, marriage of convenience, grief and second love, royalty, mating bond, disability representation, island girl and future king, fated-mate mythology.

Let Me Be Yours is the first book in Lily X’s fantasy romance Seventh Star series, published in October 2022, and it is sapphic omegaverse: a grieving future King who has lost her intended Mate is pushed by her mother into an arrangement with an island omega, on terms that are supposed to keep them at a distance.

Readers respond strongly: 4.17 on Goodreads across 1,321 ratings with 161 written reviews, 4.6 on Amazon across 800 with nothing at all below three stars, and 4.18 on romance.io. In a thirty-review sample, twenty-three were five stars. The dissent is tiny and it is unusually coherent — both critical reviews we found object to the same person.

What Is Let Me Be Yours About?

Omegaverse is a fanfiction-born subgenre built on a secondary biology — alphas, omegas, mating bonds, heat cycles — and it is overwhelmingly written male-male. A sapphic version at this length and this level of worldbuilding is rare enough that a chunk of these reviews are from readers reporting it as their first, and several say the same thing: they did not know this existed in F/F and now they want more of it. That novelty is a real part of what the book is delivering.

Artemis Brimwood is introduced through loss. She is heir to a kingdom, she has lost the Mate she was bonded to, and she is not recovering — the book is clear that this is not a wound the plot intends to heal quickly. Aeryn Sweetwater is introduced through modesty of ambition: an island girl who wants her mother and an Alpha’s approval, which is a smaller and sadder want than it first appears. The scheme Art proposes is bloodless by design — Aeryn bears her pups through artificial insemination, and the two of them live separate, unentangled lives. The novel is what that arrangement does to both of them.

What Makes This Sapphic Omegaverse Romance Work

  • It is a genuine entry point: Multiple reviewers say this is their first F/F omegaverse or even their first F/F romance, and that the mythology was legible without prior knowledge.
  • Disability representation: Readers name it explicitly and positively, which is not a common thing to find in this subgenre at all.
  • Grief is the actual subject: The opening establishes Artemis’s bereavement with enough weight that one critical reviewer says she could feel the pain of it — the complaint is about what happens next, not about this.
  • Chemistry, at length: 493 pages gives the attraction room to accumulate, and readers describe the effect in terms that suggest it lands.
  • Worldbuilding with a system: Nestia, the Brimwood line and the mating mythology are treated as a working world rather than a backdrop for the biology.

Book Synopsis

Artemis Brimwood is the future King of Nestia and she is not functioning. The Mate she was intended for is dead, the bond that should have shaped her life has nowhere to go, and grief has closed her down in a way that everyone around her can see and nobody can reach. What her mother sees instead is a succession problem: the Brimwood name requires continuation, and mourning is not a plan.

Aeryn Sweetwater wants very little. She is an island girl at heart, and what she is looking for is her mother and the approval of an Alpha — wants small enough that the size of them tells you something about the life she has had. She is the solution Art’s mother produces, and Art turns her into a proposal.

The terms are designed to cost nothing. Aeryn will bear Art’s pups by artificial insemination; there will be no bond, no intimacy, no shared life; both women will get on with their separate existences and the kingdom will get its heirs. It is a clean arrangement between two people who have agreed not to want anything from each other. What neither of them accounts for is that Aeryn is carrying more than she has said, that proximity is not neutral, and that a heart which has decided it is finished does not get a vote.

My Review

Start with what is genuinely unusual. Omegaverse is a large, well-established subgenre that is overwhelmingly written about men, and a 493-page sapphic entry with a worked-out mating mythology, a monarchy and a political reason for the arrangement is a rare object. A meaningful share of the reviews are from readers encountering F/F omegaverse for the first time, and their reaction is not politeness — one files the author into her kickass omegaverse authors category and notes there are only two names in it. The book is serving a real appetite that almost nothing else on Kindle Unlimited serves.

Let Me Be Yours by Lily X book cover

The disability representation deserves naming separately, because readers do. It comes up unprompted and approvingly in reviews that are otherwise about the romance, which is usually the sign that it has been handled as characterisation rather than as a credential.

The opening is also strong on its own terms. Both critical reviewers we found praise it — one says she could feel Artemis’s pain and grief, and that she wanted to watch this woman come to terms with it and learn to live again. That is a reader describing exactly the book she was promised.

What she got instead is where the objections land, and both of them land on Artemis. The first is structural: after the marriage — which happens off the page — the tone shifts, and the King never actually confronts anything. She is held in place by loyalty and obligation to her dead Mate and by the terms of her own agreement, and the reviewer’s complaint is that this is a state rather than a conflict. She wanted Art to have a real reckoning and did not get one.

The second is harder. A reviewer describes Artemis as a crappy Alpha and a poor lead — passive throughout, and, more damningly, slow to notice that the woman she has married has been abused and is still being abused. Her charge is that Art’s neglect functionally adds to that harm, and that it made her actively dislike the character she was supposed to be rooting for. That is one voice, but it is a specific and serious reading, and it is consistent with the other reviewer’s complaint about passivity. If you are choosing whether to spend 493 pages here, this is the thing to weigh: a protagonist whose grief is beautifully established and whose subsequent inaction some readers find unforgivable.

It should be said that the twenty-three five-star reviews in our sample do not report any of this. For most readers the slow thaw is the point and the arrangement’s gradual collapse is the pleasure. But the dissent is coherent enough to be worth reading before you start.

My honest note: A rare and genuinely ambitious thing — sapphic omegaverse at novel length with real worldbuilding and real disability rep. Whether it works for you depends almost entirely on how much patience you have for Artemis.

Element In Let Me Be Yours
Central relationship Artemis Brimwood & Aeryn Sweetwater — a grieving future King and the island omega she arranges to bear her heirs
Core tropes Omegaverse, alpha and omega, arranged marriage, marriage of convenience, grief and second love, royalty, mating bond
Setting Nestia — a kingdom with a worked-out alpha/omega mythology and a succession problem
Heat level 4/5 — explicit open door, concentrated rather than constant across 493 pages
Series Seventh Star book 1; no reviewer in our sample reports a cliffhanger
Content notes Bereavement and prolonged grief, an abusive situation affecting one lead that readers say is ongoing within the book, arranged marriage, pregnancy and artificial insemination, explicit sexual content. No published content-warning list exists for this title

How Spicy Is Let Me Be Yours?

Four out of five. romance.io bands it “Explicit open door” across 22 ratings. The important qualifier is distribution rather than level: this is a 493-page book with an arrangement designed to keep the two women apart, so the explicit content is concentrated where the arrangement fails rather than spread across the length. Readers who came for omegaverse heat specifically report being satisfied; readers expecting it throughout should recalibrate.

The element worth flagging in advance is not the biology — nobody raises a consent objection about the mating mythology — but the abuse. At least one reader describes Aeryn as having been abused and as still being abused during the book, and frames the lead’s failure to notice as part of the problem. That is a content matter and a character matter at once. For comparable heat on the site, She Came from the Swamp is 4/5 in a much shorter paranormal frame, and Her Spell That Binds Me is the 5/5 fantasy pick.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you have wanted omegaverse in a sapphic register and never found it at this scale, you read for worldbuilding as much as romance, arranged marriage that slowly stops being an arrangement is your trope, and disability representation matters to you.

You may want to skip it if: a passive protagonist frustrates you, you need grief to produce a confrontation rather than a mood, 493 pages is more than you want, or a lead who is slow to notice her partner’s abuse would ruin the book for you.

In short: the most ambitious sapphic omegaverse available, with an Alpha who spends too long doing nothing.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

This is a well-established title with an enthusiastic and fairly homogeneous readership: 1,321 Goodreads ratings against 161 written reviews, 800 on Amazon with nothing below three stars, and 22 on romance.io. There is no trade coverage and no StoryGraph community data visible. An audiobook edition is listed on Libro.fm but has no narrator or runtime published yet, which means it is announced rather than available. What is most distinctive about the discourse is how many reviewers are describing a first experience — of this author, of sapphic omegaverse, in several cases of F/F romance altogether.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The chemistry, first — described in terms that make clear the accumulation across 493 pages is doing its job. Second, the novelty: sapphic omegaverse at this scale barely exists, and reviewers say so directly, with one placing the author in a two-name category of omegaverse writers she rates. Third, disability representation, named unprompted and approvingly in reviews otherwise about the romance. Fourth, the grief writing in the opening, which even the book’s critics praise. And fifth, accessibility — readers new to the subgenre report following the mythology without difficulty.

What readers argue about and complain about: Artemis, and only Artemis. Both critical reviews we found object to the same character in compatible terms. One says the marriage happens off the page, the tone shifts afterwards, and the King never has a real reckoning with her grief — she is held in place by loyalty and obligation rather than moved by anything. The other is blunter: a passive lead, a crappy Alpha, who takes far too long to see that her mate has been abused and is still being abused, and whose neglect adds to it. That reviewer ended up disliking her. Neither complains about the world, the prose, the omega or the heat. It is a book with one problem, held by twenty-three of thirty readers to be no problem at all.

The series question worth asking first: This opens the Seventh Star series and no reviewer in our sample reports a cliffhanger. The more useful thing to know is what kind of reader you are joining: this book’s audience is substantially made up of people discovering sapphic omegaverse through it, which is why the reviews read as enthusiastic rather than comparative. If you already read omegaverse widely, the critical minority is the more relevant signal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is omegaverse, and do I need to know it first?

It is a subgenre built on a secondary biology of alphas and omegas, mating bonds and heat cycles, usually written male-male. You do not need prior knowledge — multiple reviewers say this was their first and that the mythology was legible throughout.

Does Let Me Be Yours end on a cliffhanger?

No reviewer in our sample reports one. It opens the Seventh Star series.

How explicit is Let Me Be Yours?

A 4/5. romance.io bands it “Explicit open door”, with the heat concentrated rather than spread evenly across 493 pages.

Is there disability representation?

Yes, and readers name it approvingly and unprompted, which usually indicates it is written as characterisation rather than as a box ticked.

What do the negative reviews object to?

Artemis, in both cases we found: that she is passive, that the marriage happens off the page and her grief never becomes a real confrontation, and that she is slow to notice her wife is being abused.

Is there an audiobook?

An edition is listed on Libro.fm but with no narrator or runtime published yet, so it appears announced rather than released.

If You Loved Let Me Be Yours, Read These Next

Her Spell That Binds Me is the pick for sapphic fantasy romance at 5/5 heat with a worked-out magical setting. She Came from the Swamp is the short-form paranormal option if the non-human element is the draw. And On the Same Page is where to go if what you actually want is 490-plus pages of accumulating longing in a contemporary setting. More in our paranormal Kindle Unlimited list and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Let Me Be Yours sets out to write omegaverse properly in a register the subgenre almost never uses, and on that it delivers: a real mythology, a kingdom with a succession problem, 493 pages for the arrangement to fall apart in, disability representation readers single out, and an opening that establishes grief with genuine weight. What divides it is the woman at its centre — an Alpha whose mourning never becomes a confrontation and who, by one reader’s account, fails to see what is happening to her own wife. Twenty-three of thirty readers had no such problem. Decide which of those you are likely to be. Check Let Me Be Yours on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Let Me Be Yours ranks as the flagship sapphic omegaverse romance — ambitious, well-built and unusually generous with representation, held back by a protagonist whose passivity a minority of readers find indefensible, and best approached by readers who want the subgenre in this register and are willing to wait out its Alpha.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ 4.17 average across 1,321 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4.6 on Amazon, nothing below three stars
  • ✓ 23 of 30 sampled reviews at five stars
  • ✓ Both critical reviews object to the same lead

Romance ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ Arrangement designed to fail, and does
  • ✓ 493 pages let the attraction accumulate
  • ✓ Mating mythology gives the bond real stakes
  • ✓ One lead spends much of it inert

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Aeryn’s small wants are quietly devastating
  • ✓ Disability representation named by readers
  • ✓ Grief established with real weight
  • ✓ Artemis passive; called a crappy Alpha

Writing ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ Worldbuilding treated as a system
  • ✓ Mythology legible to newcomers
  • ✓ Opening grief writing praised by critics too
  • ✓ Marriage itself happens off the page

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ Bereavement rendered convincingly
  • ✓ Aeryn’s situation carries real weight
  • ✓ Slow thaw satisfies most readers
  • ✓ Grief becomes a mood, not a confrontation

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ romance.io: “Explicit open door”
  • ✓ Omegaverse heat delivered as expected
  • ✓ Concentrated where the arrangement breaks
  • ✓ Sparse across much of the page count

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

  • ✓ No cliffhanger reported in our sample
  • ✓ Opens the Seventh Star series
  • ✓ Arrangement resolved rather than dodged
  • ✓ Reckoning readers wanted never arrives

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ Rare enough in this register to revisit
  • ✓ Worldbuilding rewards a second pass
  • ✓ Audio edition announced on Libro.fm
  • ✓ 493 pages and a frustrating lead
Find It On Amazon
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She Came from the Swamp Review — Is It Worth Reading?

She Came from the Swamp by Darva Green book cover

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Verdict: A genuinely inventive Slavic-folklore monster romance at novella length, very steamy and very short — and it spends part of its 104 pages on a third-act breakup it does not have room for.

Best for: Readers who want monster romance built on real folklore rather than generic horns and claws, who like a quick, explicit read, and who are not expecting a relationship to be developed at novel depth.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — romance.io bands it “Explicit open door”; the publisher’s own subtitle is A Steamy Monster Romance)

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.4/5 — a 3.49 Goodreads average across 1,871 ratings, one of the lowest averages in our Kindle Unlimited guides at that sample size)

Tropes: Monster romance, Slavic folklore, kikimora, inherited house, off-grid isolation, supernatural cult, forced proximity, novella length, insta-attraction, first in a series.

She Came from the Swamp is the first book in Darva Green’s paranormal Dreamers & Demons: Sapphic Monsters series, published in January 2022, and it is a 104-page romance between a woman hiding from her family’s supernatural murder cult and the ancient kikimora who came with the house she inherited.

The numbers are the most interesting thing about its reception: 3.49 on Goodreads across 1,871 ratings with 341 written reviews, 4.2 on Amazon across 762 with 21 per cent of ratings at three stars, and 3.73 on romance.io. In our thirty-review sample the largest band was four stars and the second largest was three — almost nobody hated it and almost nobody loved it. That is a specific kind of reception, and it has a specific cause.

What Is She Came from the Swamp About?

This is monster romance with actual mythology behind it, which is rarer in the subgenre than you would expect. The kikimora is a figure from Slavic folklore — a house or swamp spirit, traditionally unsettling rather than romantic — and building a love interest out of one gives the book a specificity that most monster romance, with its interchangeable inventory of horns and tails, does not have. Amazon files it in Folklore and in Occult and Supernatural Horror as well as in Lesbian Romance, which is a fair description of where it sits.

Nadezhda is introduced through flight. Her family runs a supernatural murder cult, that cult keeps endangering the people she loves, and going off-grid at her late grandmother’s house on the edge of a swamp preserve is less a holiday than an evacuation. What she does not know is that the house came with something older than the deed. The isolation is the whole engine: one woman, one shack, one preserve, and something in the water that has been there a very long time.

What Makes This Sapphic Monster Romance Work

  • The folklore is real: A kikimora is a specific creature from a specific tradition, and reviewers respond to that specificity — the concept is the most-praised element by a distance.
  • The descriptive writing: Readers repeatedly call it wonderfully descriptive, and the swamp setting does a great deal of the atmospheric work in very few pages.
  • The heat delivers: romance.io bands it at 4/5 and readers agree; the publisher’s own subtitle promises steamy and the book is not shy.
  • It is genuinely short: 104 pages, and readers who wanted a single-sitting monster romance got exactly that.
  • The cult subplot has more depth than the length suggests: One reviewer who has read several books in this vein says this one had more depth than the others, which is worth something in a category that rarely bothers.

Book Synopsis

Nadezhda’s family is not the sort you explain at parties. They run a supernatural murder cult, and the practical consequence of belonging to it is that people she cares about keep ending up in danger. Leaving is not a dramatic gesture on her part; it is risk management. Her grandmother left her a house at the edge of a swamp preserve, off-grid and unremarkable, and that is where she goes.

The shack is not the only thing she has inherited. Something has been living in the water behind the property for a very long time — a kikimora, a creature from the folklore Nadezhda grew up inside rather than reading about — and it has been aware of the house, and of the women who lived in it, for longer than she has been alive.

What she expected from the swamp was quiet. What she finds is the difference between the creature in the stories and the person in front of her, and the discovery that isolation cuts both ways: there is nobody out here to interrupt them, and nobody out here to help if the family she is hiding from works out where she went.

My Review

The concept is the reason to read this and it is a good one. Monster romance has a tendency toward generic anatomy — the creature is a delivery mechanism rather than a being from anywhere — and building a love interest out of a kikimora gives the book a texture the subgenre usually lacks. Reviewers keep using the word concept, and they mean it as praise. The swamp is rendered well, the descriptions are genuinely atmospheric, and the folklore is not decoration.

She Came from the Swamp by Darva Green book cover

The heat also does what it says. This is a book with the words steamy monster romance in its subtitle, romance.io bands it at 4/5, and readers who came for that report getting it. For a 104-page novella, a substantial proportion of the page count is explicit, which is either the point or the problem depending on which reader you ask.

And that is where it comes apart, in a way the ratings make unusually legible. In our sample the biggest band was four stars and the second biggest was three — hardly anyone hated this book and hardly anyone loved it. The reason readers give is consistent: there is not enough room. One reviewer puts it directly — she wanted more romance development and fewer sex scenes. At this length, every page spent on one is a page not spent on the other, and the relationship arrives at its conclusion faster than the reader arrives at believing it.

The specific structural mistake is the third-act breakup, and one reviewer’s verdict on it is the sharpest line in the whole discourse: third-act breakups in hundred-page books are not acceptable. She is right. A separation-and-reunion beat costs perhaps fifteen pages, and in a novella that is fifteen per cent of the book spent undoing something the reader has only just been persuaded of. The convention is doing damage across this whole category — we have flagged it in Being Hers and Boss of Her too — but nowhere is it more obviously a mistake than at this length.

Two smaller notes. The murder-cult premise is more interesting than the page count can service, and at least one reader finished with questions about it rather than satisfaction. And a contemporary pop-culture reference lands inside a sex scene hard enough that one reviewer singled it out as breaking the spell — a small thing, but in a book this short, tonal slips have nowhere to hide.

My honest note: A better idea than book, and the gap is entirely about length. If you want an hour of well-written, folklore-grounded monster romance and you can shrug off a breakup that has no business being there, it delivers.

Element In She Came from the Swamp
Central relationship Nadezhda & the kikimora — a woman hiding from her family’s cult and the ancient swamp spirit that came with her inherited house
Core tropes Monster romance, Slavic folklore, inherited house, off-grid isolation, supernatural cult, forced proximity
Setting A shack at the edge of a swamp preserve — isolated, atmospheric, and doing most of the world-building
Heat level 4/5 — explicit open door, and a large share of a very short page count
Series Dreamers & Demons: Sapphic Monsters book 1 of 3
Content notes Explicit sexual content, a supernatural murder cult and the danger it poses to family, bereavement in the backstory; no published content-warning list exists for this title

How Spicy Is She Came from the Swamp?

Four out of five. romance.io bands it “Explicit open door” across 29 ratings, and the book is sold as A Steamy Monster Romance on the cover itself, so there is no ambiguity about intent. What is worth knowing is proportion rather than level: in 104 pages the explicit content occupies a large share, and the most common qualification in the three-star reviews is that readers wanted that ratio adjusted toward the relationship.

Nothing needs flagging in advance beyond the obvious — this is monster romance, and the love interest is not human. No reviewer raises a consent concern. For the same band on the site, Midnight Rain is 4/5 at the opposite extreme of length, and Precious Red Pearls is the 5/5 pick if you want a paranormal premise played much darker at similar brevity.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want monster romance grounded in a real folklore tradition, you read for atmosphere, an explicit hour-long read is what you are after, and you do not need the relationship developed at length.

You may want to skip it if: you want romance development in proportion to the heat, a third-act breakup in a novella will annoy you, you need the supernatural plot resolved properly, or you would rather have the same idea at novel length.

In short: the best concept in sapphic monster romance, in the fewest pages it could possibly have been given.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

This book has a large and unusually lukewarm readership: 1,871 Goodreads ratings against 341 written reviews, 762 on Amazon with 21 per cent of ratings at three stars, and 29 on romance.io. There is no trade coverage and no StoryGraph community data visible. There is an audiobook, narrated by Parker Everly and running three hours and forty minutes. What is notable in the discourse is how many reviewers position themselves as sapphic monster-romance readers surveying a category rather than as fans of this author — several are explicitly comparing it against other books in the same niche, which is why the assessments read as measured rather than passionate.

Prefer audio? Listen to She Came from the Swamp on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The concept, first and by a wide margin — a kikimora is a real creature from a real tradition, and reviewers name that as what drew them in. Second, the descriptive writing, with the swamp itself repeatedly praised. Third, the heat, which delivers on the subtitle. Fourth, the length: readers wanting a short, fun, scary-and-sexy read say so and rate it accordingly. And fifth, from a reader who has worked through several books in this niche, a note that this one has more depth than its neighbours.

What readers argue about and complain about: Proportion, above everything. The recurring three-star position is that there is too much sex relative to relationship development, and that at this length one crowds out the other. Second, and much more sharply, the third-act breakup: one reviewer’s verdict is simply that breakups of that kind are not acceptable in hundred-page books, and the structure bears her out. Third, the cult subplot, which readers find more interesting than the page count can service and which leaves questions unanswered. Fourth, and smaller, a jarring contemporary reference inside a sex scene that at least one reader found spell-breaking. What almost nobody criticises is the idea or the prose.

The series question worth asking first: This is book one of three in Dreamers & Demons: Sapphic Monsters, and it resolves — no reviewer in our sample reports a cliffhanger, and the couple lands. The series continues under the Sapphic Monsters banner, and this book stands on its own. The more useful expectation to set is about scale: these are novellas by design, and if the thing you want is this concept at novel length, this series is not going to give it to you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kikimora?

A creature from Slavic folklore — traditionally a house or swamp spirit, and traditionally unsettling rather than romantic. Using a real folkloric being rather than a generic monster is what reviewers praise most about this book.

How long is She Came from the Swamp?

Around 104 pages, or three hours and forty minutes in audio. It is a novella, and the length is the source of most of the criticism.

How explicit is She Came from the Swamp?

A 4/5. romance.io bands it “Explicit open door” and the cover subtitle promises a steamy monster romance. The explicit content takes up a large share of a short book.

Is there a third-act breakup?

Yes, and it is the single most pointed criticism in the reviews — one reader’s verdict is that a breakup of that kind has no place in a hundred-page book.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes, narrated by Parker Everly and running three hours and forty minutes. It is stocked on Libro.fm.

Is it on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes, verified on the Amazon product page. Kindle Unlimited availability changes without notice, so check the listing before you rely on it.

If You Loved She Came from the Swamp, Read These Next

Precious Red Pearls is the pick for a paranormal premise played darker at similar brevity, at 5/5 heat. Ribbonwood is where to go if the isolation and the folkloric menace appealed more than the monster itself. And Her Spell That Binds Me is the longer, more atmospheric version of a supernatural premise carried by setting. More in our paranormal Kindle Unlimited list and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

She Came from the Swamp sets out to write monster romance with a real mythology under it, and the idea is the best thing in sapphic monster romance right now: a kikimora is specific, the swamp is atmospheric, and the writing is more descriptive than the category usually manages. What it does not have is room — the explicit content takes a large share of 104 pages, the relationship is asked to convince in what is left, and then a third-act breakup spends fifteen of those pages undoing it. Read it for the concept and the atmosphere, and expect a novella. Check She Came from the Swamp on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, She Came from the Swamp ranks as a strong-concept sapphic monster novella — genuinely inventive and well described, held back by a page count that cannot carry both the heat and the romance, and best approached as an atmospheric hour rather than as a love story.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ 3.49 average across 1,871 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4.2 on Amazon, 21 per cent at three stars
  • ✓ Concept praised in nearly every review
  • ✓ Four- and three-star bands dominate the sample

Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5

  • ✓ Attraction established quickly and vividly
  • ✓ Isolation gives them a real reason to connect
  • ✓ Monster-and-human dynamic handled with care
  • ✓ Development squeezed out by page count

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

  • ✓ Nadezhda’s reason for hiding is concrete
  • ✓ The kikimora is a being, not a body
  • ✓ Family cult gives her a real history
  • ✓ Neither has room to develop much

Writing ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ Descriptive writing repeatedly praised
  • ✓ Swamp setting does heavy lifting
  • ✓ Folklore used accurately, not decoratively
  • ✓ A modern reference breaks the spell for one reader

Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5

  • ✓ Isolation and grief give it an undertow
  • ✓ Cult threat supplies real stakes
  • ✓ Readers report enjoying it, rarely being moved
  • ✓ Breakup undercuts what little was built

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ romance.io: “Explicit open door”
  • ✓ Cover subtitle promises steamy, and delivers
  • ✓ Explicit content across much of the book
  • ✓ Crowds out the romance at this length

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3/5

  • ✓ Resolves; no cliffhanger reported
  • ✓ Book one of three, readable alone
  • ✓ Couple lands together
  • ✓ Third-act breakup in a 104-page book

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5

  • ✓ 3h40m audiobook read by Parker Everly
  • ✓ Short enough to revisit in an evening
  • ✓ Atmosphere holds up on a second pass
  • ✓ Little beneath the surface to return for
Find It On Amazon
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Hunger for You Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Hunger for You by Jenny Frame book cover

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Verdict: A professionally made vampire-dynasty romance with the best supporting cast on our list, hampered by a first third that assumes you have already read the prequel.

Best for: Readers who want traditionally published polish, butch-femme dynamics and vampires operating openly in the modern world — and who are willing to read a 2016 novella first.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit throughout with eroticised feeding; derived from reader reports, as romance.io has no entry)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.94 Goodreads average against 3.55 on StoryGraph, and an opening five reviewers say needs the prequel first)

Tropes: Vampire romance, blood bond, butch-femme, vampire dynasty, class difference, abandonment and trust breach, protectiveness, found family, contemporary paranormal, first in series.

Hunger for You by Jenny Frame is the first full novel in the Wild for You series, published by Bold Strokes Books in April 2018, and it is one of only two traditionally published books on our sapphic vampire list — Byron, the Principe of a vampire dynasty operating openly in the modern world, meets Amelia, and the blood bond that forms between them turns out to be the least complicated thing either of them is dealing with.

It has a 3.94 average across 623 Goodreads ratings and a 3.55 on StoryGraph, a gap wide enough to be worth explaining. The reason is not craft — Frame is a Golden Crown Literary Society winner with thirty-one books behind her and a publisher’s editorial department. It is where the book starts.

What Is Hunger for You About?

This is a contemporary paranormal romance built on a dynasty rather than a secret. Frame’s vampires are organised into clans with leadership, succession and long memories, and the specific pleasure of the setting is that it is our world with that structure laid over it — readers name the worldbuilding as one of the book’s genuine strengths precisely because the vampires are not hiding.

Byron is introduced through obligation: she is the Principe, she carries a dynasty, and the decisions available to her are not personal ones. Amelia is introduced through what she does not know she is walking into. The butch-femme dynamic between them is written deliberately rather than incidentally, which is a Frame signature and part of why her readership is as loyal as it is. What the novel then does — and this is the friction point — is assume a fair amount of groundwork that was actually laid in a 2016 prequel novella.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Dynasty Romance Work

  • Victorija and the supporting cast: Six independent reviewers name the side characters as the best thing in the book, and Victorija specifically. When a supporting character is the most-praised element, that is worth knowing going in — she is why several readers continued the series.
  • Vampires in the open: Three reviewers praise the worldbuilding, and the reason is structural: clans, leadership and succession operating in the modern world rather than in a hidden shadow society.
  • The butch-femme writing: Frame writes this dynamic on purpose and with attention, and it is the thing her readership comes back for. Goodreads readers shelve the book under butch-femme, which very few vampire romances attract.
  • Professional production: Bold Strokes editing, and it shows. No typos, no unedited-manuscript complaints, no swapped names — a genuine differentiator against most of the indie titles on this list.
  • The audiobook came first: Nicola Victoria Vincent’s recording released three weeks before the print edition and has accumulated 287 Audible ratings, which is a substantial audience by this subgenre’s standards.

Book Synopsis

Byron has been the Principe of her dynasty for longer than the modern world has existed in its current shape. The clans are organised, the succession is understood, and vampires do not pretend to be something else — they simply operate at a level most people never have cause to look at. What Byron does not have is any expectation of wanting something for herself.

Amelia comes into that world without the context for it. What forms between the two of them is a blood bond, which in Frame’s system is neither metaphor nor convenience — it is a real tie with consequences, and it arrives before either woman has decided anything.

The trouble is that a Principe’s attachments are never only hers. There is a dynasty with a view, there are older grievances still in play, and there is the matter of what Byron is prepared to do to keep Amelia out of them. The book alternates between the intimacy of the bond and the machinery around it, and the question it works toward is whether a woman whose whole life is obligation can make one choice that is not.

My Review

Hunger for You by Jenny Frame book coverThe most interesting thing about this book is that its best character is not one of the leads. Six separate reviewers name the supporting cast as the standout, and Victorija in particular — that is an unusual pattern and it tells you what Frame is actually good at here, which is populating a world. The dynasty has weight because the people in it have histories that predate the romance, and three more readers name the worldbuilding directly. Vampires operating openly in the modern world rather than hiding is a small structural choice that pays off across the whole novel.

The second real strength is professionalism, and after a run of self-published titles I do not want to undersell it. This is a Bold Strokes book. Nobody complains about typos, nobody reports swapped character names, and the audiobook — Nicola Victoria Vincent, nine hours — arrived three weeks before the print edition with a proper production behind it. Frame has thirty-one books and a Goldie on the shelf, and the difference in finish is visible on every page.

Where it struggles is the opening, and the complaint is specific enough to act on. Five independent reviewers say the first third does not work unless you have read Dapper, the 2016 prequel novella — one calls it a real struggle. Sitting alongside that, four readers say the early book is sex and blood with not much else attached; one summarises her memory of it as “lesbian sex and drinking blood, nothing much.” Those two complaints are the same complaint from different angles: the groundwork is missing, so what fills the space is heat. Three more readers find the push-pull between Byron and Amelia repetitive, two find the antagonist cartoonish, and two report the ending arriving abruptly.

One expectation to reset, and it is about awards rather than the book. Jenny Frame’s record is genuinely decorated — a 2018 Goldie for Unexpected, a 2017 Goldie finalist slot for Heart of the Pack, a 2019 Lambda finalist slot for Charming the Vicar. None of it belongs to this book. Hunger for You did not win the 2019 Goldie in its category, and if you have seen it recommended on the strength of her trophy cabinet, the trophies are for other novels.

My honest note: The most professionally made book on our list and not the most gripping one. Read Dapper first and this becomes a considerably better novel; read it cold and the first hundred pages will test you.

Element In Hunger for You
Central relationship Byron & Amelia — the Principe of a vampire dynasty and the woman she forms a blood bond with
Core tropes Blood bond, butch-femme, vampire dynasty, class difference, protectiveness, abandonment and trust breach
Setting The modern world, with vampire clans operating openly rather than in hiding
Heat level 4/5 — explicit throughout with eroticised feeding and blood-bonding; derived from reader reports, not a database band
Series Wild for You book 1 of 4, plus the prequel novella Dapper — series complete; this book ends happy-for-now with threads left open
Content notes Gore and blood flagged at moderate weight by readers; explicit sexual content, eroticised feeding and blood-bonding; violence and an antagonist threat plot; abandonment and a trust breach that drives the emotional midsection. The reader warning base here is very thin — one submission each

How Spicy Is Hunger for You?

A 4 out of 5, and this one needs its working shown. romance.io has no entry for this book at all — the database that supplies our heat bands lists the prequel and two later series entries but skips book one entirely, so there is no label to quote. The number therefore comes from Bold Strokes’ adult romance positioning plus reader reports, and those reports are consistent: sex is explicit and recurs throughout, the feeding is eroticised rather than functional, and the blood bond is written as a physical intimacy rather than a plot device.

The element worth naming in advance is distribution rather than content. Four reviewers say the first third is dominated by sex and blood at the expense of story — that is a pacing observation rather than a complaint about explicitness, and it lines up exactly with the prequel-dependency problem. Nobody in the sweep reports kink content beyond the feeding. If you want this band elsewhere, A Hunger Soft and Wild and Will It Hurt? both sit at 4/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want traditionally published polish after a run of indie titles, you read for worldbuilding and a populated supporting cast, you specifically want butch-femme, and you are happy to start with a prequel novella.

You may want to skip it if: you will not read a prequel to make book one work, you need the leads to be the most interesting people in the room, a repetitive push-pull dynamic wears on you, or you want a villain with more than one dimension.

In short: a well-made series opener that starts in the wrong place, and a prequel that fixes it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The professional record here is thinner than Jenny Frame’s standing would predict. The Lesbian Review did cover the audiobook, though its text was not reachable for this sweep. LezReviewBooks, The Lesbrary and Jude in the Stars all review Frame regularly and none of them covered this book — they took Longing for You, Courting the Countess, Charming the Vicar and others instead. No Publishers Weekly, no Kirkus. What the book does have is an audiobook audience: Nicola Victoria Vincent’s recording carries 287 Audible ratings, which is a larger listening population than most titles on this list have readers. One more absence worth reporting: we checked three separate Goodreads sapphic-vampire recommendation threads and this book is named in none of them. Readers there reach for Schwab, Breger, Ruby Roe and Lianyu Tan. For a 2018 Bold Strokes vampire novel by a Goldie winner, that is a quiet footprint.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The supporting cast, first — six reviewers name it, with Victorija singled out repeatedly, and several say the side characters are why they carried on into the series. Then the worldbuilding, from three, who specifically like that the vampires operate in the open with clan structures rather than skulking. Then the writing quality itself: one five-star reader was “hooked from page one. The writing, the descriptive detail, everything.” And a minority position worth flagging against the majority complaint — where most readers find the sex-heavy opening a problem, a group on StoryGraph treat it as the point and enjoy the book as unashamed erotic romance.

What readers argue about and complain about: The opening, above everything, and it comes with a fix attached. Five independent reviewers say you need Dapper, the 2016 prequel novella, before this makes sense, and the first third is the most-cited weakness in the book — one reviewer calls it a real struggle. Second, and connected: four readers say that opening stretch is sex and blood without much story underneath. Third: three find the hot-and-cold dynamic between Byron and Amelia repetitive. Then two on a cartoonish antagonist, two on an abrupt ending, and two on prose and point-of-view shifts. Nine per cent of ratings sit below three stars. The StoryGraph average of 3.55 against Goodreads’ 3.94 is where the opening does its damage, and one reviewer offers the counter-case neatly: this is, she says, a book not to judge by its early chapters.

The series question everyone should ask first: the series is finished and the book is not, quite. Wild for You runs to four novels plus the prequel — Dapper (2016), this, Longing for You (2020), Dying for You (2022) and Living for You (2023) — all published. Book one resolves its own arc but leaves threads open and sets up what follows, so this is a happy-for-now rather than a sealed ending, and at least one reader finished wanting more of Amelia’s background than she got. The ratings tell a familiar story: 3.92 for the prequel, 3.94 here, then 4.21 and 4.27 for books two and three. The series gets better. For context on Frame herself, she has thirty-one works and a 4.04 career average across 11,791 ratings, so this book sits just below her own line — her best-known titles are Unexpected at 4.07 and A Royal Romance at 3.98.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I read Dapper before Hunger for You?

Yes. Five independent reviewers say the first third does not work without it, and the opening is the single most-cited weakness in the book. Dapper is a 2016 novella and it is the fix for the most common complaint about this novel.

Does Hunger for You end on a cliffhanger?

No, but it is not sealed either. The book resolves its own arc on a happy-for-now and leaves threads open for the sequel. No reader in our sweep complained about being left hanging, though two found the ending abrupt.

How spicy is Hunger for You?

A 4/5, derived from reader reports rather than a database — romance.io has no entry for this book. Sex is explicit and recurring, the feeding is eroticised, and four readers say the opening third is dominated by it.

Is the Wild for You series finished?

Yes. Four novels plus the prequel Dapper, all published, ending with Living for You in 2023. Books two and three rate highest in the series at 4.21 and 4.27.

Did Hunger for You win any awards?

No. Jenny Frame’s award record is real but belongs to other books — a 2018 Goldie for Unexpected, a 2019 Lambda finalist slot for Charming the Vicar. Hunger for You did not win its 2019 Goldie category.

Is there a Hunger for You audiobook?

Yes — narrated by Nicola Victoria Vincent for Bold Strokes Books, running 9 hours 2 minutes. It released in March 2018, three weeks before the print edition, and carries 287 Audible ratings.

If You Loved Hunger for You, Read These Next

Readers reaching for comparisons here land on Ali Vali’s Cain Casey books for the butch-femme dynamic and on Anne Rice for the vampire register — neither of which we have reviewed yet. On this site, the closest match on heat and devotion is A Hunger Soft and Wild, which sits at the same 4/5 band. If it was the clan politics and succession you liked, House of Crimson Hearts runs a vampire aristocracy with far higher stakes and a full pepper more heat. And for vampires operating openly in a modern city, Will It Hurt? is the contemporary equivalent.

For more in this register, browse our best sapphic vampire romance books guide or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Hunger for You is the best-made book on our sapphic vampire list and not the most compelling one. Frame builds a vampire dynasty that operates in the open, populates it with supporting characters six reviewers rate above the leads, writes butch-femme with real attention, and delivers all of it with the editorial finish that separates a traditional publisher from a KDP upload. It is also a novel that starts in the wrong place, spends its first third on heat because the groundwork happened in a prequel, and hands its antagonist one dimension. Read Dapper first and most of that evaporates. Read it cold and you may not reach the good part. Check Hunger for You on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Hunger for You ranks as a traditionally published sapphic vampire dynasty romance — professionally made and strongest in its supporting cast, hampered by an opening that assumes a prequel you have not read, and best approached after Dapper rather than before it.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

  • ✓ 3.94 across 623 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 3.55 on StoryGraph, 7% did-not-finish
  • ✓ Bold Strokes production quality throughout
  • ✓ Five reviewers say read the prequel first

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

  • ✓ Butch-femme written deliberately
  • ✓ Blood bond has real consequences
  • ✓ Protectiveness drives the second half
  • ✓ Three readers find the push-pull repetitive

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ Six reviewers name the supporting cast
  • ✓ Victorija singled out repeatedly
  • ✓ Dynasty populated with real histories
  • ✓ Two readers find the villain cartoonish

Writing ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

  • ✓ No typos or editing complaints anywhere
  • ✓ Descriptive detail praised by five-star readers
  • ✓ Thirty-one books of craft behind it
  • ✓ Two readers report jarring POV shifts

Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Abandonment and trust breach land hard
  • ✓ Obligation versus desire drives Byron
  • ✓ Side characters carry real weight
  • ✓ First third is heat before investment

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ Explicit and recurring throughout
  • ✓ Feeding eroticised, not functional
  • ✓ Blood bond written as physical intimacy
  • ✓ No romance.io entry exists to band it

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

  • ✓ Resolves its own arc, no cliffhanger
  • ✓ Series is complete at four novels
  • ✓ Sequels rate higher at 4.21 and 4.27
  • ✓ Happy-for-now with threads left open

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

  • ✓ Nine-hour audiobook, 287 Audible ratings
  • ✓ Complete series to run straight through
  • ✓ Reads better once you know the world
  • ✓ Opening third stays a slog on return
Find It On Amazon
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Precious Red Pearls Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Precious Red Pearls by Holly Hawthorne book cover

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Verdict: A short, genuinely well-written gothic about hunger and ownership, undercut by a consent question five separate reviewers say the book never actually answers.

Best for: Dark romance readers who know what a captivity premise is and want it played straight, at novella length, with a vampire villainess worth the price on her own.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — explicit and plentiful)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.83 Goodreads average, with five reviewers saying the captivity is not handled and no content warnings published anywhere outside the book itself)

Tropes: Vampire romance, dark captivity romance, blood slave, hate to lovers, age gap, obsession, gothic Victorian setting, monster-lover, ownership dynamic, novella length.

Precious Red Pearls by Holly Hawthorne is the first book of Roseshire County, independently published in January 2024, and it is the shortest and darkest thing on our sapphic vampire list — a Victorian-flavoured gothic in which Pearl is bought as a blood slave for Lady Veilthorn, and the book’s subtitle tells you exactly what it intends to be about.

It has a 3.83 average across 758 Goodreads ratings and a very low 4% did-not-finish rate, which for a dark romance is a sign that readers know what they picked up. What splits them is not the premise. It is whether the book does anything with it.

What Is Precious Red Pearls About?

This is a dark paranormal romance at novella length — 184 pages — with a Victorian gothic register and an ownership dynamic at the centre. The subgenre it belongs to is captivity romance, which has its own conventions and its own readership, and the important thing to say up front is that this book is not pretending otherwise. It is titled and marketed as a dark sapphic captivity romance.

Pearl is introduced through what has been done to her: she has been bought. Lady Veilthorn is introduced through appetite — she is the reason there is a market, and the book is considerably more interested in her than in anyone else. What follows is a hate-to-love arc inside a house where one woman owns the other, compressed into a very short span. The brevity is a real choice, and it is both the book’s best decision and the root of the complaint most readers end up making.

What Makes This Dark Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

  • Lady Veilthorn: The most-praised element by a distance. Readers reach for screen villainesses to describe her — Maleficent, Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil — and she is the reason several of them finished a book they otherwise had reservations about.
  • The prose about hunger: Readers single out the writing specifically where it deals with appetite and monstrousness. One calls that material an outright A-plus. This is not a book with an editing problem, which sets it apart from most of the indie titles on our list.
  • The atmosphere: Gothic, Victorian, contained. The single setting does real work and the book never leaves it long enough to lose the mood.
  • The length: Under two hundred pages. Several readers name the brevity as a virtue — “a quick read but so enjoyable and unique” — and for a premise this heavy, not outstaying its welcome is a genuine strength.
  • It resolves: There is an ending and an epilogue, and book two moves to different leads entirely. You are not being held for a sequel.

Book Synopsis

Roseshire County keeps its arrangements quiet. There are households in it that require a particular kind of servant, and there is a trade that supplies them, and everyone involved has agreed not to describe it plainly. Pearl arrives at Lady Veilthorn’s door as the product of that trade, having had no part in the decision.

Veilthorn is old, rich and entirely unembarrassed about what she is. She has done this before. Pearl is not the first girl bought for this house and, by the terms of the arrangement, will not be the last. What she is is unexpectedly difficult — not defiant in any way that would be useful, but present in a way Veilthorn had not budgeted for.

The book stays inside the house and inside that imbalance. Pearl has no leverage and no exit, and the thing that develops between them develops anyway. Whether that is a romance or something the arrangement produced is the question the novella sets itself, and it is the question its readers have spent two years arguing about.

My Review

Precious Red Pearls by Holly Hawthorne book coverHawthorne can write, and specifically she can write hunger. The passages dealing with Veilthorn’s appetite and her monstrousness are the strongest thing here — readers name them directly, one of them with an unqualified A-plus — and they are why this book stands slightly apart from the indie shelf it sits on. Nobody in the reviews complains about typos, grammar or an unedited manuscript, which after several books on this list is worth saying out loud.

Lady Veilthorn is the other reason to read it. She is the rare vampire in this subgenre written as genuinely frightening rather than merely powerful, and the comparisons readers reach for are telling — not other books, but Maleficent and Lady Dimitrescu. She is a screen villainess in prose, and the novella is smart enough to know she is what people came for.

Where it struggles is the thing the subtitle promises to handle. Five independent reviewers say the consent dynamic is not dealt with, and the specific complaint is more precise than a general objection to captivity romance: it is that Pearl is written as naive to the point of childlikeness, which pushes the imbalance past the register the genre operates in. One reader says the slavery “removes her ability to give informed consent.” Another says Pearl was “too naive and childlike, it was creepy to me.” Three more find the ending rushed, and three say the world around the house is thin. Against all of that sits one five-star reader who names the same thing and shrugs: “very spicy, and highly problematic (but you know that going in).” That is the honest dark-romance position and it is worth weighing.

One thing to reset, and it is the most useful sentence in this review. There are no published content warnings for this book anywhere outside its own front matter. StoryGraph carries none — not author-submitted, not reader-submitted. A reviewer confirms the author does include a list inside the book, but no source reproduces it. So a reader arriving at this novella from a recommendation gets no advance warning of anything, in a book about slavery, a substantial age gap, and a woman turned into a vampire without being asked. That is a gap the book did not create but does not help with either.

My honest note: A better-written book than its Goodreads average suggests and a more complicated one than its marketing admits. If captivity romance is a genre you read, this is a good one. If it is a premise you are willing to try, this is not the book that will handle it gently.

Element In Precious Red Pearls
Central relationship Pearl & Lady Veilthorn — a girl bought as a blood slave and the vampire who owns the house she is delivered to
Core tropes Dark captivity romance, blood slave, hate to lovers, age gap, obsession, monster-lover
Setting Roseshire County — a Victorian-flavoured gothic world, almost entirely inside one house
Heat level 5/5 — explicit and plentiful, though one reader rates the intensity considerably lower
Series Roseshire County book 1 of 2 — resolves with an epilogue; book 2 The Dark Rose follows new leads in the same world
Content notes Reader-reported only, because no platform carries a warning list for this book: slavery and ownership of a person, captivity, blood-drinking and feeding, a character turned vampire without her consent, a substantial age gap, and on-page sex including a period sex scene. The author includes a warning list inside the book itself, which no source reproduces

How Dark and Spicy Is Precious Red Pearls?

A 5/5 on our scale. romance.io rates the steam level “explicit and plentiful,” its top band, and the frequency is well supported — one five-star reader reports “lots and lots of quality spicy content.” I should flag a genuine dispute, though: at least one reader rates the intensity at 2.5 out of 5, so what is firmly evidenced here is volume rather than peak explicitness, and the book is short enough that the two can be hard to separate.

The element to name in advance is not a kink but the frame around all of it. This is a captivity romance in which one woman owns the other outright, and five reviewers say the book does not resolve what that means for anything that happens between them. The aggravating factor readers keep naming is not the ownership itself but Pearl’s characterisation — written young and naive enough that two reviewers found the dynamic uncomfortable in a way the genre does not usually produce. Read that as information rather than as a verdict: dark romance readers accept premises exactly like this one routinely. If you want the same band with the power question handled more deliberately, The Princess’s Pet and House of Crimson Hearts both sit at 5/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read dark romance on purpose and know the conventions, you want a vampire written as genuinely frightening, you value good prose over a big world, and you want to be finished in an evening.

You may want to skip it if: you need a captivity premise to be interrogated rather than played straight, a heroine written very young in a power-imbalanced dynamic will bother you, you want the world outside the house to exist, or you rely on published content warnings before starting a dark book.

In short: the best-written book on our list that most needs you to know what you are getting into.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

There is no professional coverage of this book at all — nothing at The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, The Lesbrary, Bookish Sapphic or Jude in the Stars, and I Heart SapphFic carries a listing rather than a review. There is no verifiable BookTok activity and no author website, newsletter or social presence I could find; Holly Hawthorne joined Goodreads in January 2024 and has published these two books and nothing else. There is no audiobook in any edition. What that leaves is a book with 758 Goodreads ratings and essentially no infrastructure around it — which makes the reader record the only record, and worth reading carefully.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Lady Veilthorn, first and by a wide margin. The comparisons are consistently to screen villainesses rather than to other books, which is a real signal about what she is doing on the page. Then the prose about hunger and monstrousness, which readers name as the strongest writing in the book. Then the gothic atmosphere and the tight single setting. And then the length — several readers treat “a quick read” as a compliment here, which for a heavy premise it is. One reader’s summary, “deliciously dark,” is about as concise as the appeal gets.

What readers argue about and complain about: Consent and agency, above everything — five independent reviewers say the captivity dynamic goes unhandled, and their objection is specific rather than general. It is not that the book has a slave narrative; it is that Pearl is written naive to a degree that makes the imbalance read differently than intended, and two reviewers use words like creepy about it rather than about the premise. Second: three readers find the ending rushed, and the epilogue in particular is the single most-disliked element in the whole book — a reader who otherwise enjoyed it says she has never hated anything more. Third: three find the world outside the house underdeveloped, which is what a 184-page book buys you. The dissenting voice is worth quoting properly, because it is the most defensible position anyone takes: one five-star reader calls the romance “very spicy, and highly problematic (but you know that going in).” Ten per cent of ratings sit below three stars, and the 4% did-not-finish rate says most people who start this book know what it is.

The series question everyone should ask first: this book resolves and you are not committed to anything. Roseshire County runs to two books, and The Dark Rose — published October 2024 — follows Persis and a different vampire in the same world, with its own blurb calling it a standalone. The ratings are near-identical, 3.83 against 3.85, though book one carries more than five times the readership. Worth knowing before you go on: romance.io bands book two at 3/5 rather than 5/5, so it is a considerably cooler read. No third book has been announced anywhere, and with no author website or newsletter to check, that is genuinely all that can be said about what comes next.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Precious Red Pearls have a happy ending?

It resolves, with an epilogue, and book two moves to different leads — so nothing is left hanging. Be aware that the epilogue is the most-disliked element in the book among readers, and that Pearl’s transformation happens without her choosing it.

How dark is it, and does it handle the consent question?

Very dark, and five independent reviewers say it does not. Pearl is owned outright, and the objection readers raise is that she is written young and naive enough to make the imbalance uncomfortable rather than charged. One five-star reader accepts it as genre convention.

How spicy is Precious Red Pearls?

A 5/5. romance.io rates it “explicit and plentiful,” its top band, and readers report a high volume of content. One reader rates the intensity considerably lower at 2.5/5, so frequency is better evidenced here than peak explicitness.

Are there content warnings for Precious Red Pearls?

Inside the book, yes — a reviewer confirms the author includes a list. Outside it, none: StoryGraph carries no warnings at all for this title, author-submitted or reader-submitted, which is unusual for a captivity romance and worth knowing before you start.

Do I need to read The Dark Rose too?

No. Roseshire County book two follows different leads in the same world and is marketed as a standalone. It rates almost identically at 3.85 but is a much cooler book — romance.io bands it 3/5 rather than 5/5.

Is there a Precious Red Pearls audiobook?

No. Only Kindle and paperback editions exist, and no audio edition has been announced on any platform. If you need audio, this one is not available in it.

If You Loved Precious Red Pearls, Read These Next

No reader in our sweep offered a book-to-book comparison for this one — the comparisons are all to screen villainesses — so these are ours, on stated axes. If the owned-and-kept dynamic is the draw, The Princess’s Pet is the closest match on the list at the same 5/5 heat, with the warning that it does not resolve in one volume. If you want the darkness with more plot around it, Contract Bound puts a hunter opposite the vampire. And if what you actually wanted was a possessive vampire relationship examined rather than staged, A Dowry of Blood is the book that does it — at much lower heat and much higher intensity.

For more in this register, browse our best sapphic vampire romance books guide or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Precious Red Pearls is a better-made book than the shelf it sits on would predict. The prose about appetite is the strongest writing on our sapphic vampire list, Lady Veilthorn is the only vampire here who reads as genuinely dangerous rather than simply powerful, the gothic setting is controlled, and at 184 pages it costs you an evening. It is also a captivity romance whose central power question five readers say goes unanswered, with a heroine written young enough to make two of them uncomfortable, an epilogue nobody liked, and no published content warnings anywhere outside its own pages. Dark romance readers will be fine. Everyone else should read this paragraph twice. Check Precious Red Pearls on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Precious Red Pearls ranks as a short gothic sapphic captivity romance — genuinely well written about hunger and carried by its villainess, unresolved about its own consent question, and best approached by readers who already read dark romance rather than by readers willing to try one.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

  • ✓ 3.83 across 758 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 4% did-not-finish, unusually low
  • ✓ Prose named as a strength, not a flaw
  • ✓ Five reviewers say consent goes unhandled

Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ Hate-to-love arc inside one house
  • ✓ Veilthorn’s obsession genuinely charged
  • ✓ Contained setting keeps the pressure on
  • ✓ Ownership never resolved as a question

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

  • ✓ Lady Veilthorn is the whole draw
  • ✓ Compared to Maleficent and Lady Dimitrescu
  • ✓ Villainess written as actually frightening
  • ✓ Two readers find Pearl uncomfortably childlike

Writing ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

  • ✓ Hunger and monstrousness draw direct praise
  • ✓ No editing complaints anywhere
  • ✓ Gothic register held for 184 pages
  • ✓ Three readers find the world thin

Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ Atmosphere does real emotional work
  • ✓ Powerlessness is felt, not stated
  • ✓ Short enough to stay intense
  • ✓ Three readers find the ending rushed

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

  • ✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
  • ✓ High volume across a short book
  • ✓ Feeding written into the sensuality
  • ✓ One reader rates the intensity 2.5/5

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5

  • ✓ Resolves; book two moves to new leads
  • ✓ No cliffhanger and no commitment
  • ✓ Epilogue closes the arc formally
  • ✓ The epilogue is the most-disliked element

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

  • ✓ Under 200 pages, an evening to revisit
  • ✓ Veilthorn worth returning to
  • ✓ Companion novel in the same world
  • ✓ No audiobook and a thin wider world
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Deadly Kiss Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Deadly Kiss by Ariel Marie book cover

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Verdict: A dystopian blood-draft premise with real teeth and a properly satisfying ending, badly let down by a manuscript that eight separate reviewers say was never edited.

Best for: Readers who want fated mates and a protective vampire at full heat, who care more about premise and payoff than prose, and who are happy to start a series at its weakest book.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — explicit and plentiful)

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.79 Goodreads average against 3.3 on StoryGraph, with eight reviewers naming the same editing problem)

Tropes: Vampire romance, fated mates, human blood draft, forced match, protectiveness, hurt/comfort, interracial romance, royal family, first in series, insta-love.

Deadly Kiss by Ariel Marie is the first book of The Immortal Reign, published by RNB Publishing in October 2021, and it runs on a premise the rest of our sapphic vampire list does not attempt — humans are drafted into service as a blood supply, and Quinn Hogan’s name comes up for a vampire princess who was not expecting to find her mate at the end of a conscription order.

It has a 3.79 average across 1,111 Goodreads ratings and a 3.3 on StoryGraph, which is a wide gap for the same book. The reason is not the story. Eight independent reviewers name the same craft problem, and two of them report something specific enough to be worth knowing before you buy.

What Is Deadly Kiss About?

This is a paranormal romance built on a dystopian frame rather than a hidden-world one. Vampires are not concealed here; they govern, and the arrangement between them and the human population is formalised into a draft. That structure does the thing court intrigue usually has to work for — it makes the power difference between the two leads a matter of law rather than temperament.

Quinn is introduced through what has already been decided for her: her name, her assignment, and a body that other people have a claim on. Velika Riskel is introduced through what she assumes, which is that this is administration. She is one of three sisters in a ruling family, and the series that follows gives each of them a book. The mating bond arrives early and the rest of the novel is about what two people do with a certainty neither of them asked for.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Fated-Mates Romance Work

  • The draft premise: The most-praised element. A legally compelled blood supply gives the book stakes that exist before the romance does, and readers name it as the reason they kept going.
  • The fated-mates payoff: Readers who like this trope report it delivering. The bond is not a shortcut here so much as the problem — it lands on two women who have no framework for it.
  • Protectiveness: Velika’s protectiveness toward Quinn is the emotional engine and the thing enthusiasts name after the premise.
  • The heat: romance.io’s top band, with the biting written into it rather than beside it — blood is flagged as graphic content by readers, and one reviewer specifically names the blood play.
  • It resolves properly: Book one ends with the couple together, and the series confirms it — by book two they are mated and expecting a child. No cliffhanger, no hostage-taking.

Book Synopsis

The world Quinn Hogan lives in has already made its arrangement with the vampires who run it. Humans are drafted, assigned, and expected to comply, and the paperwork is very tidy about what that means. Quinn has spent her life keeping her head down and hoping the system would look past her. It does not.

Velika Riskel is one of three sisters in a ruling family and has responsibilities she has never had reason to question. The draft is a mechanism she has always been on the correct side of. Then Quinn is delivered to her, and the bond that announces itself is not something Velika has a protocol for — she has spent centuries not expecting to find a mate, and certainly not like this.

What the book does with that is refuse to pretend the setup is romantic. Quinn arrives frightened, with reason. Velika has power she cannot give back and a family with its own view of what a human is for. The mating bond insists on something both women have to decide whether they want independently of it. Around them, the politics that made the draft possible have not stopped moving.

My Review

Deadly Kiss by Ariel Marie book coverThe premise is genuinely good and I want to give it its due before the rest of this. Most vampire romance has to manufacture a reason for a human and a vampire to be stuck with each other. Marie starts from a society that has legislated it — a blood draft, a forced match, paperwork — and that means the power imbalance is structural rather than a personality trait. It also means Quinn’s fear is legitimate rather than coy, which is a harder and more interesting place to start a romance from. Readers name the premise first when they explain why they finished.

The second strength is that it pays off. Fated mates is a trope that lives or dies on whether the bond feels like a problem or a shortcut, and here it is written as a problem for long enough to matter. The protectiveness that follows is the part enthusiasts name most often after the premise, and the resolution is real — book one ends with Quinn and Velika together, which book two confirms by giving them a child. In a subgenre where roughly a third of the titles we have reviewed end mid-story, that counts.

Where it struggles is that the manuscript reads unedited, and this is not a minority view — it is the single most repeated criticism in the reviews, from eight independent reviewers. One puts it as “the prose was so bad it felt unedited.” Another says it reads like low-tier fanfiction. And two separate readers report the same specific failure: character names swapped mid-scene, so the wrong woman is doing the thing. That is not a stylistic quibble, it is a proofreading failure, and it is why the StoryGraph average sits nearly half a point under the Goodreads one. Around it: four readers report insta-love without earned tension, three find the plot predictable, and two say the sex crowds out the story.

One thing to weigh before you start, flagged by a single reviewer and worth surfacing anyway. She reads the first sex scene as non-consensual given the state Quinn is in — frightened, drafted, carrying trauma. No other reviewer raises it and I am not going to inflate one voice into a consensus, but for a book whose entire premise is compelled service, a reader deserves to know the objection exists before page one rather than after it.

My honest note: A four-star idea inside a two-star manuscript. If typos and swapped names will end the book for you, start with book two instead — the series climbs steeply, and you will not lose anything you need.

Element In Deadly Kiss
Central relationship Quinn Hogan & Velika Riskel — a drafted human and the vampire princess she is assigned to, who turn out to be fated mates
Core tropes Fated mates, human blood draft, forced match, protectiveness, hurt/comfort, insta-love
Setting A society where vampires govern and humans are conscripted as a blood supply, and the Riskel ruling family
Heat level 5/5 — explicit and plentiful, with blood play written into the sex
Series The Immortal Reign book 1 of 4 published — each book a new couple; book 1 ends on an HEA
Content notes Gore, graphic sexual content, violence, blood and kidnapping flagged at graphic weight; sexual assault, sexual violence and sexual harassment at moderate weight; grief and death of a parent at minor weight. One reader reads the first sex scene as non-consensual given the heroine’s state. Reader warning counts here are thin — one reader each

How Spicy Is Deadly Kiss?

A full 5/5, and this is a correction to what we previously published on our hub page. romance.io rates the steam level “explicit and plentiful,” its top band — not the four we had it at. Readers agree, and two of them complain about the volume rather than the intensity, describing pages and pages of it.

The element worth naming is the biting, because it is the thing this subgenre’s readers actually ask about. It is not decorative here: blood is flagged as graphic content by readers, one reviewer specifically names the blood play, and no reviewer describes the feeding as mechanical or plot-only. That makes it erotic rather than functional — also a correction to our earlier hub listing. If you want this band elsewhere, The Princess’s Pet and House of Crimson Hearts both sit at the same 5/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a power imbalance that is built into the world rather than into a personality, you read fated mates for the bond as a problem, you want explicit heat with real blood play, and you want a resolved ending.

You may want to skip it if: unedited prose ends a book for you, swapped character names would break the spell, you need attraction to build rather than announce itself, or a compelled-service premise is not something you want in a romance.

In short: the best premise on our list attached to the worst copy-editing, and the series gets much better immediately after.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

There is no professional coverage of this book anywhere — nothing at The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, The Lesbrary, Bookish Sapphic or Jude in the Stars, and I Heart SapphFic carries a listing rather than a review. There is no independent BookTok either; searches return the author’s own promotional posts and nothing else. What is actually moving the book is a dual-narrator audiobook from RNB Publishing, released June 2022 at 8 hours 3 minutes, and a series that readers are working through in order. One oddity worth flagging: the Libro.fm listing carries an AI-narration flag, which sits strangely against two named human narrators. Sample it before you commit.

Prefer audio? Listen to Deadly Kiss on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The draft premise, first — it is the thing readers name when explaining why they stayed with a book they had complaints about. Then the fated-mates payoff, from readers who came specifically for that trope and got what they wanted. Then Velika’s protectiveness. Then the spice, which several five-star readers treat as a headline feature. One reader calls it a “unique take on a familiar paranormal trope,” which is a fair summary of the split — the premise is fresh, the execution is not. On representation: romance.io tags the book for a Black main character and the author markets it as an interracial sapphic romance, but I should be straight with you that I could not find a single reader review engaging with that, on any platform. The tags and the marketing are the only firm evidence, and I am not going to invent reader sentiment that does not exist.

What readers argue about and complain about: Editing, above everything, and it is not close. Eight independent reviewers name unpolished prose, grammar or an unedited manuscript, and two of them report character names being swapped mid-scene — a proofreading failure rather than a style preference. Second: four readers report insta-love with no tension built before the bond arrives. Third: three find the plot predictable. Then two on the sex-to-story ratio and two on the audio narration. One reviewer raises a consent objection to the first sex scene, uncorroborated by anyone else. Thirteen and a half per cent of ratings sit below three stars, and the StoryGraph average of 3.3 against Goodreads’ 3.79 is where the craft complaint shows up most clearly. One genuine outlier worth naming: a three-and-a-half-star reviewer concedes the editing is bad and rates the romance a success anyway, which is the most honest summary of this book anyone has written.

The series question everyone should ask first: book one resolves, and this is now settled — our hub page previously listed the ending as unverified, and it should not have. Quinn and Velika end together, and book two shows them mated with a child on the way. The Immortal Reign is structured so it has to work that way: four books published, each following a new couple, with the first three covering the three Riskel sisters and a fifth listed for 2026. The more useful number is the trajectory. Book one sits at 3.79 across 1,111 ratings; Iced Heart at 4.19, Royal Bite at 4.31, Wicked Allure at 4.56. This is the most-read and the weakest book in its own series, and the gap is half a star. One more thing worth correcting: this is not Ariel Marie’s first sapphic work. Her Nightstar Shifters series ran to six F/F books starting in 2020, a year before this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Deadly Kiss end on a cliffhanger?

No. Quinn and Velika end the book together, and book two confirms it by showing them mated and expecting a child. Each book in The Immortal Reign follows a new couple, so nothing is held back.

How spicy is Deadly Kiss?

A 5/5. romance.io rates it “explicit and plentiful,” its top band, and the biting is written into the sex rather than beside it. Two readers complain about the volume rather than the intensity.

Do I need to read The Immortal Reign in order?

No. Each of the four published books follows a different couple, with earlier leads recurring as secondaries. If the editing on book one puts you off, starting at Iced Heart costs you very little.

Is the writing really that rough?

Eight independent reviewers say so, and two report character names swapped mid-scene. That is a proofreading failure rather than a matter of taste, and it is the main reason StoryGraph rates the book nearly half a star below Goodreads.

Is there a Deadly Kiss audiobook?

Yes — narrated by Ann Vaughn and Xenia Willacey for RNB Publishing, running 8 hours 3 minutes, released June 2022. It is on Libro.fm, though that listing also carries an AI-narration flag which sits oddly against two named narrators, so sample it first.

Is this Ariel Marie’s first sapphic book?

No. Her Nightstar Shifters series began in 2020 and runs to six F/F books, and she has since written a third sapphic series, The Montana Grizzlies. She has a substantial paranormal backlist across both F/F and M/F.

If You Loved Deadly Kiss, Read These Next

No reader in our sweep supplied a read-alike for this one, so these are ours, chosen on specific axes. If the claimed-human dynamic is what held you, The Princess’s Pet runs the same engine at the same 5/5 heat with a royal court around it — though it does not resolve in one volume. If it was the ruling-family politics, House of Crimson Hearts gives you a vampire aristocracy with a trials plot attached. And if you want the vampire-and-human bond written with cleaner prose, Will It Hurt? is the better-made book.

For more in this register, browse our best sapphic vampire romance books guide or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Deadly Kiss has the most interesting premise on our sapphic vampire list. A legislated blood draft makes the power gap between its two women structural rather than decorative, the fated-mates bond is written as a problem before it becomes a comfort, the heat is at the top of the scale with the biting properly inside it, and — the thing a third of this subgenre cannot manage — it finishes. It is also a manuscript that eight readers say was never edited, with two of them catching the wrong character’s name in the wrong place. The series climbs half a star immediately afterwards and never looks back. Read it for the idea, and forgive the file. Check Deadly Kiss on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Deadly Kiss ranks as an indie sapphic vampire romance with a dystopian engine — a genuinely strong premise with a resolution that lands, badly served by its own copy-editing, and best approached as the entry point to a series that gets substantially better after it.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ 3.79 across 1,111 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 3.3 on StoryGraph, a wide gap
  • ✓ Premise and resolution both deliver
  • ✓ Eight reviewers name the editing

Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Fated-mates bond written as a problem
  • ✓ Protectiveness carries the middle
  • ✓ Power gap is structural, not stylistic
  • ✓ Four readers report unearned insta-love

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ Quinn’s fear is legitimate, not coy
  • ✓ Velika has a family with its own agenda
  • ✓ Three sisters set up a whole series
  • ✓ Interiority thins once the bond lands

Writing ★★★☆☆ 2.7/5

  • ✓ Draft premise cleanly established
  • ✓ Fast-paced by reader consensus
  • ✓ Eight reviewers report unedited prose
  • ✓ Two report character names swapped

Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5

  • ✓ Conscription gives real pre-romance stakes
  • ✓ Protectiveness lands for most readers
  • ✓ Consequences exist outside the couple
  • ✓ Predictable by three readers’ account

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

  • ✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
  • ✓ Blood play written into the sex
  • ✓ Blood flagged as graphic by readers
  • ✓ One reader disputes the first scene’s consent

Ending ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

  • ✓ HEA, confirmed by book two
  • ✓ Couple mated with a child by the sequel
  • ✓ Series structure rules out a cliffhanger
  • ✓ Resolution arrives without much resistance

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

  • ✓ Dual-narrator audiobook at eight hours
  • ✓ Series climbs steeply after this
  • ✓ Sets up three sisters worth following
  • ✓ Prose gives little reason to return
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Carmilla and Laura Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Carmilla and Laura by S.D. Simper book cover

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Verdict: A short, warm rewrite of the 1872 story that invented the lesbian vampire, built specifically so that this time the women survive it — gentler on horror than the source, and unapologetic about that.

Best for: Readers who love the original Carmilla and have never forgiven its ending, and who want an evening-length gothic romance rather than a scary book.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — on the page but not graphic; see below, there is no romance.io entry for this book)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — a 4.20 Goodreads average across 3,814 ratings, against a recurring complaint that it is a romance where readers wanted horror)

Tropes: Vampire romance, gothic retelling, historical, forbidden love, ill heroine, slow seduction, monster-lover, found ending, class and reputation, doomed-lovers reversal.

Carmilla and Laura by S.D. Simper is a standalone novella from Endless Night Publications, published in December 2018, and it is a direct answer to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla — the 1872 novella that invented the sapphic vampire and then, in the way of 1872, destroyed her. Simper takes the same two women, the same schloss, the same slow seduction, and refuses the ending.

It has a 4.20 average across 3,814 Goodreads ratings, which makes it comfortably the most-read book on our sapphic vampire list and S.D. Simper’s most-read title by a distance. It also has a 3% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph, one of the lowest we have recorded. The argument in the reviews is not about quality. It is about genre.

What Is Carmilla and Laura About?

This is a historical romance wearing gothic clothes, and knowing which of those is load-bearing will decide whether you enjoy it. Le Fanu’s original is a horror story in which a young woman’s mysterious illness turns out to be a beautiful house guest feeding on her, and it ends the way Victorian horror ended those stories. Simper keeps the architecture — the isolated schloss, the wasting sickness, the guest who arrives after a carriage accident — and rebuilds what it is for.

Laura is introduced through what she lacks: company, a mother, a life beyond a father’s estate and a father’s plans for her. Carmilla is introduced through what she assumes, which is that she already knows how this ends because it has ended the same way for centuries. The novella’s real invention is Carmilla’s backstory — Simper gives her an origin the original never bothered with, and it recasts her hunger as grief rather than appetite.

What Makes This Sapphic Gothic Retelling Work

  • The ending, which is the entire point: Simper discards Le Fanu’s destruction. Five independent sources confirm the women survive together. For a text whose cultural legacy is a beheaded lesbian, that is not fan service — it is the thesis.
  • The epilogue: Named more specifically than any other single element. One reader says it triggered “goosebumps and bliss,” and several treat it as the reason to read the book at all.
  • Carmilla’s origin: The novella gives her a history the original withholds, rooted in suicide and a family line, and readers consistently name it as the strongest addition.
  • The length: Under two hundred pages and a five-hour audiobook. It is a one-sitting book, and the compression is why the atmosphere holds — there is no baggy middle to sag.
  • Laura gets to choose: The original’s Laura is acted upon from beginning to end. This one is not, and readers notice.

Book Synopsis

Laura lives in her father’s schloss in Styria with almost nobody for company, in the particular loneliness of a girl whose future has already been decided by other people. She has been ill, on and off, since childhood, and she has had a dream about a beautiful woman for as long as she can remember.

Then a carriage overturns outside the house and a young woman is left in their care — languid, evasive about her origins, and unaccountably familiar. Carmilla will not discuss her family, will not appear before afternoon, and will not stop looking at Laura in a way that neither of them names. Laura’s health begins to falter again. Girls in the surrounding villages are dying.

What the novella does with a story every reader already knows the shape of is slow it down and let the two women be honest earlier than they are supposed to be. Laura understands what Carmilla is well before the men with the paperwork arrive, and understanding it does not stop her. The question is not whether Carmilla is the monster. It is what Laura is prepared to do once she has decided she does not care.

My Review

Carmilla and Laura by S.D. Simper book coverThis book exists to fix an ending, and it fixes it. That sounds like a small ambition and it is not. Carmilla is the founding text of the lesbian vampire — every book on our list descends from it — and it concludes with the woman staked and beheaded by a committee of men. A century and a half of queer readers have loved that novella while flinching at its last chapter. Simper wrote the version where they get out, and she does it without pretending the original was something other than what it was. Five separate sources confirm the resolution, and it is the single most-searched question about this book for a reason.

The second strength is compression. This is a novella — under two hundred pages, five hours in audio — and the discipline shows. The atmosphere does not have time to go slack, the seduction moves, and the epilogue lands hard enough that readers name it more often than any other element in the book. Simper also does the one genuinely inventive thing the retelling needed: she gives Carmilla an origin. Le Fanu never explains her; here the vampirism grows out of a death and a family line, and it turns the hunger into grief. That is the addition that earns the book its independent existence.

Where it struggles is horror, and the complaint is consistent enough to name: four independent reviewers say the gothic menace has been softened out. Carmilla is never really a threat, the dread never quite arrives, and one reader says outright that it lacked the creepy register the setting promises. Around that sit three readers who find it too faithful to be interesting — one uses the word fanfiction — and two who feel the book waves away Carmilla’s body count a little too easily. Two more found the romance declared faster than earned. None of that is a large minority: fewer than five per cent of ratings sit below three stars.

One expectation to reset, and it cuts both ways. If you came from Le Fanu wanting the same dread with a better ending, you will find the dread thinned. If you came from contemporary vampire romance wanting five peppers, you will find something considerably more restrained — three readers describe the sex as present but not graphic, and two complain it is too tame. It is a romance about wanting, written at a Victorian temperature on purpose.

My honest note: The best possible use of a retelling — it argues with its source instead of copying it. Read it for the ending you were always owed, not for a fright.

Element In Carmilla and Laura
Central relationship Laura & Carmilla — the isolated daughter of the schloss and the vampire who has done this many times before
Core tropes Gothic retelling, forbidden love, monster-lover, slow seduction, ill heroine, doomed-lovers reversal
Setting Styria, a remote schloss, and the countryside where girls have started dying — Le Fanu’s own geography
Heat level 3/5 — on the page but not graphic. There is no romance.io entry for this book; the number comes from reader reports
Series Standalone novella — complete, with an epilogue. A Deluxe edition adds three bonus stories
Content notes Blood, lesbophobia and homophobia as live plot pressure, death, murder, violence, fire and fire injury, injury detail, sexual content, gore, sexual assault, suicide and body horror all flagged at graphic weight by readers; rape, miscarriage, domestic abuse, pregnancy and physical abuse at moderate or minor weight; suicide is also the origin of Carmilla’s vampirism

How Spicy Is Carmilla and Laura?

A 3 out of 5, and this one needs its working shown. There is no romance.io entry for this book at all — the database that supplies our heat bands has never catalogued it, which for a 3,814-rating title is unusual and tells you it is not being filed as adult romance. The number therefore comes from reader reports, and they are consistent: sex is on the page and it recurs, but it is not explicit. One reviewer calls the intimate scenes “really beautiful. Not clinical or smut like.” Another puts it as “nothing too explicit, but enough.”

The element worth naming in advance is that two readers actively wanted more, and one benchmarks it unfavourably against Tanith Lee’s vampire fiction for lacking overt eroticism. So three is a ceiling here rather than a midpoint — if you are coming from five-pepper indie vampire romance, calibrate down. Worth noting too: no source in our sweep describes the biting itself as eroticised, which separates this from most of the subgenre. If you want a comparable temperature, A Dowry of Blood sits in the same band and works the same gothic register.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you have read Le Fanu and resented the last chapter, you want a complete gothic romance in one evening, you like your vampires sad rather than powerful, and you would rather have longing than explicit heat.

You may want to skip it if: you want genuine horror and dread, you find close retellings inherently uninteresting, you need explicit sex in a vampire romance, or you want a monster whose kills the narrative takes seriously.

In short: a corrective rather than a scare, and it is very good at being a corrective.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The professional record here is one review — Jude in the Stars gave the audiobook four stars in May 2021, calling it “a sexier, faster-paced retelling of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.” Nothing from The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, The Lesbrary, Bookish Sapphic or I Heart SapphFic; a handful of independent blogs covered it, ranging from five stars to six out of ten. There is no trade coverage and no verifiable BookTok activity. What this book has instead of a campaign is the source text: Carmilla is public domain, permanently in circulation, and readers who finish it go looking for exactly this. That is a discovery engine no marketing budget can buy, and it explains a self-published novella reaching 3,814 ratings. There is an audiobook, narrated by Lois Ridge for Endless Night at 4 hours 59 minutes, released in 2021 — Jude in the Stars praises the narration, though one listener found it monotonous.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The ending, first and above everything — this is a book people recommend by its outcome. Then the epilogue specifically, which gets named more often than any other individual element; one reader reports “goosebumps and bliss.” Then the prose and the atmosphere. Then Carmilla’s expanded backstory, which readers treat as the retelling’s real contribution rather than a decoration. And running under all of it, a straightforward pleasure in the fact that the queer couple survives a story built to kill them.

What readers argue about and complain about: Horror, above everything. Four independent reviewers say the gothic dread has been defanged — Carmilla never reads as a genuine threat, and one says plainly that the creepy register never arrives. Second: three readers find it too faithful to justify itself, with one calling it fanfiction-adjacent and a blog scoring it six out of ten on the same grounds. Third: two find the romance declared faster than the page count earns. Two more object that Carmilla’s victims are morally waved away, which is a fair reading of a book that wants you to like her. And two wanted considerably more heat. There is one clean split worth flagging: StoryGraph’s own page tags it slow-paced while its reviewers skew fast-paced, which is what happens when a short book is dense rather than slow.

The standalone question worth asking first: it resolves, completely, and no sequel is needed or offered. There is a Deluxe edition — a leather-bound Kickstarter production — that adds three bonus stories, which is the only reason to think about editions at all. Where you go next is Simper’s own catalogue, and the numbers there are instructive: this is her most-read book by a wide margin at 3,814 ratings, but it is mid-pack on rating. Her Fallen Gods series climbs considerably higher — Among Gods and Monsters at 4.47, Tear the World Apart at 4.60, Eve of Endless Night at 4.69 — on much smaller and more self-selected audiences. Carmilla and Laura is the door into her work rather than the best room in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Carmilla and Laura have a happy ending?

Yes. Simper discards Le Fanu’s destruction ending entirely — the women survive and stay together, confirmed by five independent sources including the author-adjacent summaries and multiple reviewers. This is the book’s whole reason for existing.

Do I need to read Le Fanu’s Carmilla first?

No, but it doubles the effect. The 1872 original is public domain and free, and it is short. Reading it first turns this from a nice vampire novella into a deliberate argument with a text that killed its heroine.

How spicy is Carmilla and Laura?

A 3/5, derived from reader reports rather than a database — romance.io has no entry for this book. Sex is on the page and recurring but not graphic, and two readers actively wanted more than they got.

Is Carmilla and Laura horror or romance?

Romance, and four separate reviewers say the horror is softened out. Carmilla is never written as a genuine threat, and the dread of the original does not survive the retelling. Go in for the love story.

How long is Carmilla and Laura?

It is a novella — between 138 and 187 pages depending on edition, and 4 hours 59 minutes in audio. Most readers finish it in one sitting.

Is there a Carmilla and Laura audiobook?

Yes — narrated by Lois Ridge for Endless Night Publications, running 4 hours 59 minutes, released in 2021. Jude in the Stars praised the narration; one listener found it flat, so sample it first.

If You Loved Carmilla and Laura, Read These Next

Readers recommending this book land most often on A Dowry of Blood, which works the same gothic register at a similar temperature and with considerably more cruelty in it. An Education in Malice comes up almost as often — readers describe it as a Carmilla-and-Laura dynamic moved to a women’s college — with the warning that it does not resolve like a romance. The third name in those threads is A Long Time Dead, which shares the Victorian setting and the melancholy but runs four hundred pages and a full pepper hotter.

For more in this register, browse that same guide or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Carmilla and Laura is a book with one job and it does it. The founding text of this entire subgenre ends with its lesbian vampire staked and beheaded, and Simper wrote the version where the two women walk out of it together — with an epilogue readers keep singling out and a backstory for Carmilla that the original never bothered to supply. It is also gentler than its source, restrained where modern vampire romance is explicit, and close enough to Le Fanu that three readers wanted more invention. At under two hundred pages, finding out costs you an evening. Check Carmilla and Laura on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Carmilla and Laura ranks as a corrective gothic novella — the 1872 original rewritten so the women live, softer on horror than its source, and best approached as a romance arguing with Le Fanu rather than as a book that will frighten you.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ 4.20 across 3,814 Goodreads ratings
  • ✓ 3% did-not-finish, among the lowest recorded
  • ✓ Most-read title on our vampire list
  • ✓ Four reviewers say the horror is defanged

Romance ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

  • ✓ Seduction moves without stalling
  • ✓ Laura chooses rather than is chosen
  • ✓ Longing carries where heat does not
  • ✓ Two readers find the declaration rushed

Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ Carmilla given an origin Le Fanu withheld
  • ✓ Hunger rewritten as grief
  • ✓ Laura has agency the original denied her
  • ✓ Two readers say her victims are glossed over

Writing ★★★★☆ 4/5

  • ✓ Prose and atmosphere top the praise list
  • ✓ Novella length keeps it taut
  • ✓ Period register held throughout
  • ✓ Three readers find it too faithful to matter

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

  • ✓ Epilogue named more than anything else
  • ✓ Answers a 150-year-old injury
  • ✓ Lesbophobia written as real pressure
  • ✓ Dread of the original does not survive

Heat Level ★★★☆☆ 3/5

  • ✓ On the page and recurring
  • ✓ Sensual rather than graphic
  • ✓ No romance.io entry exists to band it
  • ✓ Two readers wanted considerably more

Ending ★★★★★ 4.6/5

  • ✓ Le Fanu’s destruction ending discarded
  • ✓ Both women survive, confirmed five ways
  • ✓ Epilogue closes it properly
  • ✓ The reversal is predictable by design

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

  • ✓ One-sitting length invites returning
  • ✓ Five-hour audiobook as a second pass
  • ✓ Deluxe edition adds three bonus stories
  • ✓ Little plot mystery left on a reread
Find It On Amazon
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