Some Desperate Glory Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh book cover

Verdict: A Hugo-winning space opera about a lesbian soldier raised inside a death cult and the slow, brutal work of unlearning it — one of the best character arcs in modern science fiction, and not a romance in any sense a sapphic romance reader would recognise.

Best for: Readers who want a military institution rendered with real cruelty, a protagonist who begins genuinely repellent and earns her way out, and who are here for the argument rather than the couple.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — no romance.io entry; a queer awakening rather than a romance, with the love interest largely offpage)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.9/5 — a 4.05 Goodreads average across 21,846 ratings, with a first half a lot of readers cannot get through)

Tropes: Military indoctrination, deprogramming arc, unlikeable protagonist, space station dystopia, genocide and its aftermath, found family, queer awakening, reality-warping weapon, standalone, Hugo winner.

Some Desperate Glory is Emily Tesh’s debut novel, published by Tordotcom — a 438-page sapphic space opera set on Gaea Station, where the last scraps of humanity raise their children to avenge the destruction of Earth, and Valkyr — Kyr — has been the best warrior of her generation since she was old enough to hold a weapon. When Command sends her brother to certain death and assigns her to the nursery to bear sons until it kills her, Kyr decides to take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

It holds a 4.05 average across 21,846 Goodreads ratings, it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and it is the most decorated book on our sapphic Fourth Wing read-alike list. It is also a book with a 5% one-and-two-star block whose objections are entirely legitimate and worth reading before you start. Both halves of that split matter here more than usual.

What Is Some Desperate Glory About?

This is military science fiction written as a study of radicalisation, and the institution is the antagonist from page one. Gaea Station is not a war college with harsh instructors; it is a compound that has organised every part of a child’s life around a genocide that already happened, assigns adults their function by aptitude test, and treats women as reproductive stock once their combat value expires. Tesh writes the interior logic of that world from inside a true believer’s head, which is the book’s method and its risk.

Kyr is introduced through certainty rather than lack. She is the best, she knows it, she has never questioned a single thing she was told, and the beliefs she has absorbed are ugly in specific and named ways — readers list homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and eugenics, and they are not exaggerating. Everything the novel does afterwards depends on how completely it commits to that opening. The arc is not redemption in the soft sense; it is a person discovering that the entire frame she thinks with was installed.

What Makes This Sapphic Space Opera Work

The character arc: The most-praised element, and readers reach for superlatives — one describes searing character work in the register of the Locked Tomb series with the energy of a Vorkosigan novel.
The institution: Gaea Station is the most convincing depiction of a war college as a machine for producing damaged people that this list contains.
Moral clarity: Reviewers repeatedly use that phrase. Tesh writes a bigot from the inside without ever endorsing her, which is much harder than it sounds.
The structure: The book changes shape more than once, and readers describe a point somewhere past the midpoint where they started screaming and did not stop.
It is one book: A standalone that resolves, in a genre where almost nothing is.

Book Synopsis

Earth is gone. The Majoda destroyed it with the Wisdom — an all-powerful weapon that reshapes reality itself — and what remains of humanity lives on Gaea Station, a military compound built on a single organising principle: while we live, the enemy shall fear us. Children are raised to fight. Aptitude decides what you become. Everything about a life on Gaea is a contribution to a revenge that has been coming since before anyone currently alive was born.

Valkyr is the best of her generation. She has trained for this since she could stand, she has never doubted the mission, and she is waiting to be assigned to the work she was made for. Then Command posts her brother Magnus to an operation nobody returns from, and assigns Kyr herself to the nursery — to bear sons for the war until the bearing kills her. It is the first order in her life she cannot make sense of.

So she goes after her brother, and the person who helps her is Avi, his brilliant and profoundly seditious friend, who has spent years quietly working out how the Wisdom actually functions. What Kyr finds outside the station is not the enemy she was promised. It is a universe in which most of what she believes is a lie constructed for a purpose, in which the people she was taught to hate are people, and in which the weapon that killed her planet can be used to ask a much more dangerous question than revenge. The novel is about what a person does when the whole apparatus she thinks with turns out to belong to somebody else.

My Review

Let me start with the thing that will decide whether you read this: Kyr is, for a substantial stretch of the opening, genuinely horrible. Not prickly, not abrasive — a bigot, in the specific ways her upbringing has manufactured. One reviewer who DNF’d and came back lists it plainly: cruel, homophobic, transphobic, racist, a eugenicist, and an unbearable point of view to sit inside. She is not wrong about any of that. What she is describing is the book working exactly as designed, and whether that is a feature or a fatal flaw is the only real question here.

What Tesh does with it is remarkable. This is a novel about radicalisation written from inside the radicalised person, and it never once winks at the reader or gives Kyr a secret private decency to reassure us. Her deprogramming is slow, humiliating and repeatedly incomplete, and it earns every inch. Readers who stay describe an arc as searing as anything in the Locked Tomb, and the Hugo win is not a surprise once you have finished it.

The second strength is Gaea Station itself. If what gripped you about a war college is the institution — the ranking, the aptitude assignment, the casual disposal of the people it produces — this is the most rigorous version of that idea in modern science fiction. Basgiath kills cadets on a parapet; Gaea assigns them to breeding duty and calls it service. The book is unusually clear-eyed that an institution does not need to be sadistic to be monstrous, only certain.

Where it struggles, for our readers specifically, is that it is not a romance and it is barely a love story. This needs saying directly because the book turns up on every sapphic recommendation list. A reviewer puts it exactly: “there’s a ton of gay, great, but I do want to make it clear: there’s no f/f romance in this. Our protag gets a gay awakening, for sure, but the would-be love interest is extremely offpage and the least developed person in the book.” That is accurate. Kyr is a lesbian and her sexuality matters enormously to her arc. There is no relationship on the page to follow.

The other genuine criticism is the first half as an experience rather than as a construction. Several thoughtful readers report five-star emotions, three-star emotions and zero-star emotions inside one book, which is an honest summary. If you cannot spend two hundred pages inside a hostile narrator, no amount of payoff will retrieve it for you.

My honest note: One of the best science fiction novels of the decade and one of the least romantic books on this site. Read it for Kyr’s unmaking; do not read it because someone told you it was sapphic and left it there.

Element	In Some Desperate Glory
Central relationship	None in the romance sense — Kyr’s bond with her brother and with Avi drives the plot; her queer awakening has no on-page partner
Core tropes	Military indoctrination, deprogramming arc, unlikeable protagonist, genocide aftermath, found family, queer awakening
Setting	Gaea Station — a militarised remnant of humanity, and the wider universe of the Majoda and the Wisdom
Heat level	1/5 — no on-page romance at all
Series	Standalone — it resolves completely, with no sequel required or announced
Content notes	Radicalisation, genocide, homophobia and transphobia voiced by the narrator, misogyny, forced reproduction, rape and sexual assault, suicide

How Spicy Is Some Desperate Glory?

romance.io has no entry, and in this case the absence is the whole answer: this is a Tordotcom space opera, it is not shelved as romance anywhere, and it does not contain one. A 1 out of 5 is the honest number, and even that overstates it — the accurate description is that Kyr experiences a queer awakening across the novel while the woman it points toward stays almost entirely offpage.

What does need flagging is content, and there is a lot of it. Reader-supplied warnings cover radicalisation, homophobia and transphobia voiced by the narrator, misogyny, forced reproduction, rape and sexual assault. Tesh is not gratuitous, but she is not gentle either, and the first half asks you to live inside a worldview that is actively hostile to the people most likely to pick this book up. Nothing on this site is comparable; the nearest low-heat entries are Gideon the Ninth at 1/5 and Cinders of Yesterday, both of which at least have a relationship to follow.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want the most rigorous depiction of a military institution in this genre, you can sit inside a hostile narrator for two hundred pages, you read for argument and structure, and a standalone with a real ending appeals.

You may want to skip it if: you want a sapphic romance, you need a protagonist you can like early, bigotry voiced in first person is unbearable to read even when the book condemns it, or the content list above includes something you avoid.

In short: a magnificent novel that is on sapphic reading lists for the identity of its protagonist rather than for anything a romance reader wants.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

This book has the largest institutional footprint of anything we have reviewed: 21,846 Goodreads ratings, 3,897 written reviews, the Hugo Award for Best Novel and a Locus nomination. The audiobook — Sena Bryer narrating 16 hours 14 minutes — is stocked on Libro.fm rather than being an Audible exclusive, and it is one of the more commonly recommended ways into the book, because a narrator can carry an unlikeable first-person voice that some readers cannot manage on the page.

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Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The character arc first and by a distance. Reviewers describe searing character work, and one reaches for a comparison stack — the hyperactive energy of a Vorkosigan book, the character arcs of the Locked Tomb, and a moral clarity she names explicitly. Second, the structural surprise: the novel changes shape more than once, and readers describe a point past the midpoint where they started screaming and did not stop. Third, the institution — Gaea Station is treated as the genuine antagonist, and readers who have thought about radicalisation say Tesh gets the mechanics right. Fourth, and unusual for a book this bleak, several readers report it as the first book they finished for pleasure in months. The minority view worth flagging is from readers who found nothing groundbreaking here and simply enjoyed a good story well told — a four-star position that pushes against the hype in both directions.

What readers argue about and complain about: The first half, above everything, and the mechanism is that the reader is confined to the head of a person whose beliefs are repellent. One reviewer who did not finish it, read spoilers, and came back to finish anyway describes the first fifty per cent as dreadful and lists Kyr’s bigotries in detail, rating the back half around three stars by comparison. That is the sharpest version of a complaint several readers make more gently. Second, and the one that matters most for our readers: there is no f/f romance. A reviewer states it outright — a gay awakening, yes, but the would-be love interest is extremely offpage and the least developed person in the book. Third: a mixed-emotions problem. One thoughtful three-star review reports five-star, three-star and zero-star feelings across a single reading, which is the most honest description of the experience anybody has written. The genuine split is between readers who treat the opening as the price of the argument and readers for whom it is simply unbearable.

The standalone question worth asking first: This is a complete standalone. It resolves, no sequel is required, and none has been announced — unusual and welcome in a genre where everything is book one of something. If you want somewhere to go next in Tesh’s catalogue, her Greenhollow duology is a much gentler pastoral fantasy and shares almost nothing with this book except the quality of the sentences. Check Some Desperate Glory on Amazon →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Some Desperate Glory a sapphic romance?

No. Kyr is a lesbian and her queer awakening is central to her arc, but there is no f/f romance on the page — one reviewer states plainly that the would-be love interest is extremely offpage and the least developed person in the book.

Why is the first half of Some Desperate Glory hard to read?

Because you are confined to the head of a radicalised narrator. Kyr voices homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and eugenicist beliefs she was raised into, and the novel makes no attempt to soften them before it dismantles them.

Did Some Desperate Glory win any awards?

Yes — it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for a Locus Award. It is the most decorated book on our sapphic Fourth Wing read-alike list.

Is Some Desperate Glory a standalone?

Yes. It resolves completely, no sequel is required and none has been announced, which is unusual for the genre.

Is there a Some Desperate Glory audiobook?

Yes. Sena Bryer narrates 16 hours 14 minutes, and it is available on Libro.fm rather than being an Audible exclusive — a common recommendation for readers who struggle with the first-person voice on the page.

Is Some Desperate Glory like Fourth Wing?

For the institution, yes — Gaea Station is the most rigorous depiction of a war college as a machine for producing damaged people in modern science fiction. There are no dragons, no trials in the Basgiath sense and no romance, so it matches one pillar extremely well and the others not at all.

If You Loved Some Desperate Glory, Read These Next

The Unbroken is the closest match on this site — conscription, indoctrination and a protagonist who fails hard — while Gideon the Ninth shares the lethal-institution structure with an actual relationship to follow, and Crier’s War gives you the oppression politics with a romance attached. The full ranked list is in our guide to sapphic books like Fourth Wing, with more across our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Some Desperate Glory sets out to write radicalisation from the inside and to make its reader live there, and it succeeds at three things almost nothing else does: Kyr’s unmaking is one of the great character arcs in recent science fiction, Gaea Station is a genuinely rigorous portrait of an institution, and the novel keeps changing shape without ever losing its argument. What it does not offer is a romance, a likeable opening, or an easy two hundred pages — and a meaningful group of readers never gets past the first of those. Read it as literature, not as sapphic romance. Check Some Desperate Glory on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Some Desperate Glory ranks as a major, award-winning sapphic space opera — extraordinary on character and institution, constrained by a hostile first half and the complete absence of an on-page romance, and best approached for Kyr’s deprogramming rather than for anything a romance reader is looking for.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

✓ 4.05 average across 21,846 Goodreads ratings
✓ Hugo Award for Best Novel and a Locus nomination
✓ Character arc praised in near-superlative terms
✓ 5% at two stars or below, all on the first half

Romance ★★★☆☆ 2.5/5

✓ Kyr’s queer awakening is central to her arc
✓ Sexuality is load-bearing rather than decorative
✓ Found-family bonds carry real emotional weight
✓ No f/f romance on the page; love interest offpage

Characters ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

✓ Kyr’s deprogramming compared to the Locked Tomb
✓ Written from inside a bigot without endorsing her
✓ Avi and Magnus both fully realised
✓ Kyr is repellent for a substantial opening stretch

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

✓ Hugo Award for Best Novel
✓ “Moral clarity” is the recurring phrase
✓ Novel changes shape more than once and holds
✓ First-person voice is punishing by design

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

✓ Readers report screaming past the midpoint
✓ Radicalisation mechanics rendered convincingly
✓ Named as the first book finished in months
✓ Content list is long and genuinely heavy

Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5

✓ No romance.io entry — not shelved as romance
✓ No on-page romantic or sexual content
✓ Queer awakening without a partner in scene
✓ Sapphic lists recommend it on identity alone

Ending ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ Complete standalone that resolves
✓ No sequel required or announced
✓ Structural turns pay off by the close
✓ The payoff is back-loaded past a hard opening

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

✓ 16 hour 14 minute audiobook by Sena Bryer
✓ Stocked on Libro.fm, not an Audible exclusive
✓ Opening reads entirely differently once known
✓ Few readers want to relive the first half

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August 16, 2026 0

Sanctuary of Night Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Sanctuary of Night by Tessa Brooks book cover

Verdict: A fast, atmospheric dark sapphic vampire romance with a strong premise — a legal researcher who finds a pre-crime protection racket and hides inside a vampire containment zone — let down by world-building and characterisation that several readers describe as unfinished.

Best for: Readers who want a quick, plot-forward vampire romance with a cold, controlled protector and a possessive edge, and who care more about momentum than about depth.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — no romance.io steam band; derived from the publisher’s dark slow-burn billing and the absence of any spice discussion in the reviews)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 4.03 Goodreads average with an unusually heavy 11% at two stars, all naming the same two problems)

Tropes: Dark romance, vampire protector, forced proximity, protection turning possessive, mortal and immortal, forbidden across a legal code, conspiracy on the run, ancient ruler, slow burn, series opener.

Sanctuary of Night is Tessa Brooks’s self-published opener to A House of Nightfall — a 286-page dark sapphic vampire romance in which Zoe Riley, a legal researcher who copies a buried framework designed to shield powerful people from crimes they have not yet committed, runs from the men sent to retrieve it and collapses at the gates of Nightfall — a vampire-run containment zone that offers survival rather than mercy, and assigns her a keeper called Isabela Cruz.

It holds a 4.03 average across 98 Goodreads ratings and 4.3 across 119 on Amazon. That average is doing a lot of hiding: 42% five stars and 11% two stars, with nothing at one, and the two blocks are describing books so different you would not know they were the same title. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Sanctuary of Night About?

This is dark paranormal romance in its containment-and-control register rather than its gothic one. The vampires of Nightfall are not aristocrats in a manor; they are an administration, policing a hidden war under a legal code that treats mortals as liabilities. That framing is what makes the premise work — Zoe arrives having discovered one system that protects the powerful from consequences, and takes shelter in another one that does the same thing more honestly.

Zoe is introduced through knowledge rather than lack: she has seen something she was not supposed to see, and everything that happens to her follows from refusing to unsee it. Isabela is the inversion — cold, disciplined, sworn to enforce laws she did not write, and assigned to keep alive exactly the kind of liability those laws exist to eliminate. Watching over both of them is La Oscura, Nightfall’s ancient ruler, for whom love has always been the most dangerous variable. The book is structured so that every step toward the two women wanting each other is also a step toward breaking protocol.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

The premise: A legal researcher uncovering a pre-crime immunity framework is a genuinely unusual on-ramp to a vampire novel, and it gives the pursuit plot a reason to exist.
Nightfall as a place: A containment zone with laws, enforcement and a ruler is a more interesting vampire setting than a coven, and it makes the protection-as-cage theme structural rather than stated.
Pace: The strongest and most consistent praise. Readers describe being hooked from the first page and unable to put it down, and 286 pages go quickly.
Isabela’s control: The cold, contained protector is what the book is selling and what its fans respond to — the possessive turn is signposted in the blurb and delivered.
The series is already there: Two more House of Nightfall books were published within eight weeks of this one, so readers who finish it can continue immediately.

Book Synopsis

Zoe Riley reads documents for a living, which is a safe job until the day it is not. Buried in the material she has been asked to organise is a framework — a set of arrangements that protect certain people from consequences for crimes they have not committed yet. It is not a conspiracy theory; it is filed, structured and functioning. She copies it, which is the decision the rest of her life turns on, and within hours there are men at her door who are not interested in negotiating.

She runs until running stops being possible, and where she stops is the gate of Nightfall. Nightfall is not a sanctuary despite the name. It is a containment zone, administered by vampires who police a war most of the world does not know is happening, and it operates on a law that has no exceptions and no compassion clause. What it offers is survival, priced accordingly, and what it does not offer is the option of leaving once you have been let in.

Isabela Cruz is assigned to keep Zoe breathing. She is cold, exact and entirely committed to a code that classifies mortals as liabilities to be managed, and the assignment is beneath her in every way that matters. But the cabal hunting Zoe does not stop at the gates, the reasons they want her back turn out to reach further into Nightfall than either woman expects, and every hour Isabela spends guarding her makes the protocol harder to hold. Above them both, La Oscura watches — the ancient who built these laws, and who has her own history with what happens when a vampire decides a mortal is worth the exception. The question the book keeps circling is whether being kept safe by someone is meaningfully different from belonging to her.

My Review

The premise is the best thing here, and it is better than the vampire-romance shelf usually offers. Starting a paranormal novel with a legal researcher and a document is an unusual choice, and it pays off structurally: Zoe is running from a system that manufactures impunity, and she takes refuge in a jurisdiction that does the same thing openly. Nightfall as a containment zone with statutes and enforcement rather than a coven with etiquette is the other good idea, and it makes the protection-becomes-possession theme in the blurb something the plot enacts rather than announces.

The second strength is momentum. This is a 286-page book that moves, and the readers who like it are unanimous about why — hooked from the first page, could not put it down, defeated a reading slump, one hell of a story. For a certain kind of evening that is exactly the product, and the five-star reviews are genuinely enthusiastic rather than polite.

Where it struggles is that the book does not feel finished, and this is the dominant complaint. Two separate two-star reviewers reach independently for the same metaphor: it reads like a one-shot that has been stretched to novel length. One says the world-building felt empty and the characters lacked the passion she wanted, and adds a precise observation — that Zoe’s words and actions are sometimes repetitive or disproportionate to the moment, as if the book is asserting her character traits rather than demonstrating them. The other says the writing itself was not really the problem, though it got repetitive, and that she had to suspend disbelief for both the world-building and certain characterisation. Eleven per cent of all ratings sit at two stars, which is high for a 4.03 average, and the reasoning behind them is consistent.

There is one more thing an honest review has to note, and it needs stating carefully because it is a reader observation rather than an established fact. A Goodreads user has publicly flagged a suspicion that the book is AI-generated, on the grounds of the author’s output rate. The verifiable part is the cadence: Sanctuary of Night was published on 1 April 2026, and the third House of Nightfall novel followed on 25 May 2026 — three books of roughly 286 pages each inside eight weeks, alongside German and Italian editions. That is unusually fast and it is not proof of anything; plenty of prolific indie authors write to a schedule and translations are routinely outsourced. It is raised here because it is part of the discourse around the book and because a reader deciding whether to spend an evening on it deserves to know the question exists.

My honest note: A strong premise and a genuinely propulsive read, thin in the places a longer draft would have filled. Worth a Kindle Unlimited borrow; think harder before paying for it.

Element	In Sanctuary of Night
Central relationship	Zoe Riley & Isabela Cruz — a fugitive legal researcher and the vampire enforcer assigned to keep her alive
Core tropes	Dark romance, vampire protector, forced proximity, protection turning possessive, mortal and immortal, conspiracy on the run
Setting	Nightfall — a vampire-administered containment zone policing a hidden war, ruled by the ancient La Oscura
Heat level	3/5 — dark and possessive, but not explicit-forward
Series	A House of Nightfall book 1 — books 2 and 3 already published and in Kindle Unlimited
Content notes	Pursuit and threat of violence, coercive confinement, blood drinking, possessive behaviour framed as protection, institutional corruption

How Dark and Spicy Is Sanctuary of Night?

romance.io lists the book without a steam band, so the number here is derived rather than reported. Two sources point the same way. The publisher calls it a dark, slow-burn sapphic vampire romance about “protection that turns into possession” and promises that “desire has teeth” — language that sells intensity rather than frequency. And the readers, across ten written reviews, never discuss the spice at all: the one comment that comes close is from a reader who wanted more, specifically an angsty bleeding-out scene she did not get. A 3 out of 5 is the honest placement — on the page, dark in register, not the book’s selling point.

The darkness is worth taking more seriously than the heat. Zoe is confined by people who have classified her as a liability, the protection she receives is not something she can decline, and the possessive turn is the arc rather than a wrinkle in it. If coercive confinement framed as care is a line for you, this book sits directly on it by design. For comparison on this site, Eternal Captive runs a similar captivity-and-vampire dynamic, and The Dark Legend sits at the same 3/5 with the plot in front.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a fast dark vampire romance you can finish in a sitting, a cold and controlled protector is your type, you like the possessive turn signposted rather than smuggled in, and a strong premise carries you past thin execution.

You may want to skip it if: you need world-building with weight behind it, you notice when a character’s traits are asserted rather than shown, repetition wears you down, or you want a book that feels like it went through a full development draft.

In short: a good idea delivered at speed — borrow it, do not build an evening around it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The review pool here is small and unusually polarised. There are 98 Goodreads ratings and 10 written reviews after four months, no trade coverage, no Reddit footprint, no audiobook and no TikTok presence — Libro.fm does not stock it. It is also worth noting the shape of the positive reviews: most are two or three lines long and generic in phrasing, of the “cracking vampire story, smashing stuff” variety, while the negative reviews run to full paragraphs with specific structural criticism. That imbalance is not proof of anything either way, but it is the texture of the evidence, and it is why this review weights the detailed reviews more heavily than the star average does.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Momentum first — “hooked from first page till last,” “a book I couldn’t put down,” and one reader crediting it with breaking a reading slump and beating out bigger authors she had tried that month. Second, the pairing: readers describe the connection between Zoe and Isabela as sustained throughout rather than arriving late, and one calls the tenderness beautifully crafted against the dark setting. Third, the thematic hook — more than one reviewer reads the book as being about finding the strength to become who you are and fighting for your own freedom, which is a fair reading of a plot about a woman escaping two systems in a row. Fourth, the series: several finish saying they are going straight into the next two books, which are already out.

What readers argue about and complain about: Depth, above everything, and two separate two-star reviewers reach the same diagnosis independently — the book reads like a one-shot extended past its natural length. The mechanism is specific: the world-building is described as empty, requiring suspension of disbelief to hold together, and the characterisation is delivered by assertion, with one reviewer noting that Zoe’s words and reactions are sometimes too strong for the situation in an apparent attempt to establish her personality. Second, and connected: repetition, named by both critical reviewers as a feature of the prose rather than the plot. Third: emotional flatness — one reviewer says plainly that she did not find herself rooting for Zoe, which is the sharpest thing you can say about a protagonist on the run. Fourth, and unresolved: at least one Goodreads reader has publicly questioned whether the book is AI-generated, citing the author’s publication rate. That is a suspicion, not a finding, and it is recorded here as part of the discourse rather than as a conclusion. The genuine split is between readers who want a fast dark vampire read and readers who want a fully built one.

The series question everyone should ask first: No reviewer reports a cliffhanger, and the series question is unusually easy to answer — A House of Nightfall already runs to three books, with The Price of Night and She Who Brings The Night both published by late May 2026 and both in Kindle Unlimited at 4.4 on Amazon. There are also German and Italian editions of all three. If you like book one, nothing is standing between you and the rest of it; if you do not, you have lost an evening rather than a commitment.

Frequently Asked Questions

How spicy is Sanctuary of Night?

A 3/5, and that number is derived rather than reported — romance.io has assigned no steam band, the publisher sells it on darkness rather than frequency, and across ten written reviews no reader discusses the spice.

Does Sanctuary of Night end on a cliffhanger?

No reviewer reports one, and the question is largely moot: books two and three of A House of Nightfall were both published by late May 2026 and are both in Kindle Unlimited.

Why do some readers give Sanctuary of Night two stars?

Two detailed negative reviews reach the same conclusion independently — that it reads like a short story stretched to novel length, with empty world-building and character traits asserted rather than shown.

Is there a Sanctuary of Night audiobook?

Not as of August 2026. Libro.fm does not stock it and no audio edition is listed elsewhere.

Is Sanctuary of Night on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes, and so are the two sequels and the German and Italian editions — which makes borrowing the sensible way to test it.

Is Sanctuary of Night a dark romance?

Yes, by design. Zoe is confined by people who classify her as a liability, the protection she receives is not something she can refuse, and the publisher describes the arc as protection turning into possession.

If You Loved Sanctuary of Night, Read These Next

Eternal Captive runs the closest dynamic on this site — vampire captivity where the confinement is the romance — while Fanged Interest takes the same vampire-and-mortal power gap somewhere lighter, and Blood from the Marrow is the one to read if you want this premise executed with real craft behind it. More in dark lesbian romance and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Sanctuary of Night sets out to be a dark sapphic vampire romance about the price of being kept safe, and it gets three things right: the legal-conspiracy on-ramp is genuinely original, Nightfall as an administered containment zone beats a coven, and the book moves fast enough that its fans finish it in a sitting. What it does not get right is depth — the world is thin, the characterisation is asserted, and the prose repeats itself, all of which its critics identify independently and precisely. If a quick, dark, propulsive vampire read is what you want tonight, borrow it. Check Sanctuary of Night on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Sanctuary of Night ranks as a fast, atmospheric indie dark vampire romance — strong on premise and momentum, constrained by thin world-building and characterisation its own readers name, and best approached as a borrow rather than a purchase.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ 4.03 average across 98 Goodreads ratings
✓ 4.3 on Amazon across 119 ratings
✓ Premise and pace praised without exception
✓ 11% at two stars, with detailed structural reasons

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ Protection-into-possession arc is signposted and delivered
✓ Connection described as sustained, not late-arriving
✓ Cold protector is exactly what the blurb sells
✓ A reviewer reports the leads lacked passion

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

✓ Isabela’s control is the book’s clearest characterisation
✓ La Oscura gives the world a real authority
✓ Zoe’s premise is a strong starting position
✓ Traits asserted rather than shown, per two reviewers

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Fast and readable throughout
✓ One critic states the writing was not the problem
✓ 286 pages that readers finish in a sitting
✓ Repetition named by both detailed negative reviews

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

✓ Read by several as a story about claiming freedom
✓ Tenderness against a cold setting singled out
✓ Hooked-from-page-one is the recurring praise
✓ One reader reports not rooting for the heroine

Heat Level ★★★☆☆ 3/5

✓ No steam band assigned on romance.io
✓ Publisher sells darkness rather than frequency
✓ No reader in ten reviews discusses the spice
✓ One reader wanted considerably more than she got

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

✓ No cliffhanger reported by any reviewer
✓ Books two and three already published
✓ Both sequels sit at 4.4 on Amazon
✓ Resolution described as quick by its critics

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

✓ Short enough to revisit in one sitting
✓ Full trilogy plus translations available in KU
✓ Premise rewards a second look at the setup
✓ No audiobook, and repetition worsens on a reread

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August 16, 2026 0

Of Dreams and Poison Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Of Dreams and Poison by Darva Green book cover

Verdict: Sleeping Beauty crossed with Robin Hood, run as high-heat dark fairytale — the best-rated Darva Green book on our list, ending on a cliffhanger whose second half is already published and also on Kindle Unlimited.

Best for: Readers who want a morally grey heroine, shadow magic and dragons at top-band heat, and who will borrow both halves of a duology at once.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — no romance.io entry; billed by the author as high-heat and confirmed by readers as delicious spice)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.2/5 — a 4.42 Goodreads average with a hard cliffhanger and a small written-review base)

Tropes: Dark fairytale retelling, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, morally grey heroine, fated mates, shadow wielding, dragons, oath and vow conflict, high heat, duology.

Of Dreams and Poison is the second entry in Darva Green’s Happily Ever After Dark series and the first half of The Dragon and The Devouring Tree, a self-published dark sapphic fairytale romance published in January 2025, in which a woman bound by an oath will do anything to get someone called Rosemary to safety, including breaking that oath to keep a different vow.

It holds a 4.42 average across 369 Goodreads ratings and just 35 written reviews, against 4.7 across roughly 274 Amazon ratings — the joint-highest Amazon rating of any Darva Green title on our Kindle Unlimited list. That is a strong reception on a small written base, and what the few reviews there are agree on is unusually consistent. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Of Dreams and Poison About?

Happily Ever After Dark is a fairytale-retelling series where each entry stands alone or forms half of a duology, and this one is explicitly the first part of a two-book story. The pitch is a collision of two source texts — Sleeping Beauty meets Robin Hood — which means a cursed sleeper on one side and an outlaw with a code on the other, and the code is what drives the plot.

Green writes at the dark, high-heat end of fairytale romance. The protagonist is morally grey rather than reluctantly heroic, the magic runs on shadow, and there are dragons. The narrator’s own framing is the clearest statement of the stakes: she will do anything to get Rosemary to safety even if there is no happy ending in it for her, and the question she keeps asking is whether an oath can be broken in order to uphold a vow.

What Makes This Dark Sapphic Fairytale Work

The trope stack: A reader lists it approvingly — morally grey lead, fated mates, shadow wielding, dragons, delicious spice, and sapphic. This book knows what its audience came for.
Two fairytales, not one: Sleeping Beauty supplies the curse, Robin Hood supplies the moral bind. The combination gives the plot somewhere to go that neither source would alone.
Pacing designed for a duology: A reviewer notes that because this is a duology the pacing is perfect — the book is not padding toward a sequel, it is half of a story.
Heat: Billed as high-heat by the author and confirmed by readers without dissent.
The second half exists: Of Thorns and Wings is published, rates 4.7 on Amazon across 169 ratings, and is also on Kindle Unlimited.

Book Synopsis

It was always meant to be a tale of the dragon and the devouring tree. That is how the book announces itself, and it is a fair warning: this is a story that knows it is a story, built out of two fairytales that were never designed to sit together.

Rosemary is the sleeper. Around her is a curse, and around that is a situation nobody in it chose. The woman telling the story is not the one under the spell — she is the one who has sworn something, to someone, about something, and who now finds that keeping the oath and protecting Rosemary have become incompatible propositions.

What she is prepared to do about that is the whole book. She will get Rosemary to safety even if there is no happy ending waiting for her at the end of it, which is a promise the narrative takes seriously rather than as romantic hyperbole. Around them: shadow magic, a dragon, an outlaw’s moral code applied to a fairytale world, and a set of obligations that cannot all be honoured. The question is not whether she loves Rosemary. It is whether an oath can be broken in the service of a vow, and what it costs a morally grey woman to find out.

My Review

The premise is the most efficient thing on this list. Sleeping Beauty meets Robin Hood is a five-word pitch that tells you the shape of the entire book: a curse that needs breaking, and a protagonist whose defining trait is that she has principles she cannot all keep at once. Fairytale retellings usually pick one source and decorate it; combining two that pull in different directions gives Green a structural engine rather than an aesthetic.

What readers respond to is the trope density, and they are cheerfully unembarrassed about it. One review reads like a checklist — morally grey main character, fated mates, shadow wielding, dragons, delicious spice, and sapphic — and that is an accurate description of the offer. This is not a book trying to transcend its genre. It is a book delivering an unusually complete version of it, which is why the Amazon rating sits at 4.7.

The oath-versus-vow question is what lifts it above the checklist. A protagonist who will save someone knowing there is no happy ending in it for her is a real dramatic position, and it gives the shadow magic and the dragons something to be about. Green has written four books on our Kindle Unlimited list and this is the one where the moral machinery is doing the most work.

What has to be flagged clearly is the ending, and the reviews do it for me. The most useful review opens with it as a first note: this ends on a cliffhanger. The same reader adds the important qualification — because this is a duology, the pacing is perfect — and then the detail that matters most: they did not go into it knowing it was a duology. That is the failure here, and it is a packaging failure rather than a writing one. Another reviewer says they were scared to read the ending and feral to know more. Waiting was the experience for early readers; it does not have to be yours.

My honest note: A dense, confident dark fairytale with a genuine moral bind at the centre. Borrow it and Of Thorns and Wings together and the one real complaint against it disappears.

Element	In Of Dreams and Poison
Central relationship	An oath-bound, morally grey protagonist and Rosemary, the woman she will ruin herself to protect
Core tropes	Dark fairytale retelling, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, morally grey heroine, fated mates, shadow wielding
Setting	The Happily Ever After Dark world — fairytale retellings with dragons and shadow magic
Heat level	5/5 — no romance.io entry; billed as high-heat and confirmed by readers
Series	Happily Ever After Dark #2, and part 1 of The Dragon and The Devouring Tree — hard cliffhanger; part 2 is published and on KU
Content notes	Explicit sexual content, 18+ throughout, violence, curses, morally compromised choices, peril

How Dark and Spicy Is Of Dreams and Poison?

A 5/5. romance.io has no entry for this title, so there is no catalogued band — but the author bills it as high-heat sapphic dark fairytale and marks it as containing elements fit for an 18+ audience, and readers confirm without dissent, one describing delicious spice as part of the reason the book works. Green writes at the explicit end consistently across her catalogue and this is no exception.

The darkness is fairytale-dark rather than grimdark: curses, moral compromise and real consequences, but not the sustained cruelty of the vampire end of this list. For the same author at comparable heat and greater length, Of Tides and Snow is the other Happily Ever After Dark book on our list, and She Came for Blood runs her monster-romance world at 5/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want fairytale retellings with actual teeth, you like a heroine bound by incompatible obligations, shadow magic and dragons are a draw, and you will borrow both halves at once.

You may want to skip it if: you want a complete story in one book and will not read part two, you dislike fated mates, you need the romance to be gentle, or trope-dense romantasy feels like a checklist to you.

In short: a well-built dark fairytale that is genuinely half a book, with the other half already waiting.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

Darva Green has the most books of any author on our Kindle Unlimited list — four — and the discourse pattern is the same across all of them: high ratings, fast accumulation, very few written reviews. This one has 369 Goodreads ratings against just 35 written reviews, which is under one in ten and the second-lowest engagement rate we have covered. There is no trade coverage, no Reddit footprint and no audiobook on Libro.fm. What there is is a readership that moves through her catalogue in bulk — one reviewer reports consuming five Darva Green books in a single week and rating every one of them five stars, which is a useful description of how this author is actually read.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The trope density, named as a virtue rather than apologised for. One reader lists what the book delivers — morally grey main character, fated mates, shadow wielding, dragons, delicious spice, and sapphic — and the enthusiasm is for getting all of it at once. Second, the retelling premise: Sleeping Beauty meets Robin Hood is quoted back approvingly, and readers who came for fairytale retellings report it satisfying that specifically. Third, the pacing, with a reviewer noting that because this is a duology the pacing is perfect — the book is not stretched, it is half of something. Fourth, the emotional pull of the ending, described by one reader as being scared to read it and completely feral to know more.

What readers argue about and complain about: The cliffhanger, and specifically not being warned about it. The most useful review opens with it as a first note, then makes the sharper observation: they did not go into this knowing it was a duology. That is the real complaint — not that the book ends unresolved, but that nothing on the cover told them it would. There is one 1.5-star rating with no accompanying text, which cannot be interpreted. Beyond that there is no dominant negative theme, and with 35 written reviews there is not enough material to construct one honestly. Treat the 4.42 as real and lightly evidenced.

The series question everyone should ask first: This is part one of two and it ends hard. The good news is that Of Thorns and Wings — part two of The Dragon and The Devouring Tree — is published, holds 4.7 on Amazon across 169 ratings, and is also on Kindle Unlimited, so the complete story costs two borrow slots and no waiting. That puts this in the better half of our list: of the books here that end on cliffhangers, only this one and Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely have their conclusions already available. Borrow both at once and the single recurring complaint against this book does not apply to you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Of Dreams and Poison end on a cliffhanger?

Yes, and hard. It is part one of The Dragon and The Devouring Tree. The good news is that part two, Of Thorns and Wings, is already published, rates 4.7 on Amazon and is also on Kindle Unlimited — so borrow both at once.

What fairytales is Of Dreams and Poison based on?

Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood. The curse comes from one and the moral bind — an oath that cannot be kept alongside a vow — comes from the other, which is what gives the plot its engine.

How spicy is Of Dreams and Poison?

A 5/5. There is no romance.io entry, but Darva Green bills it as high-heat sapphic dark fairytale and marks it 18+, and readers confirm without dissent.

Do I need to read the Happily Ever After Dark books in order?

No. The series collects dark fairytale retellings where each story is either a standalone or part of a duology. This one is half of a duology, but it does not require the earlier book, Of Tides and Snow.

Is Of Dreams and Poison on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes, and so is its sequel. It carried the Kindle Unlimited badge on its Amazon listing when we checked in August 2026. Availability changes without notice, so confirm the badge before you borrow.

Is there an audiobook of Of Dreams and Poison?

No. We found no audio edition and it is not stocked on Libro.fm, which is consistent across Darva Green’s catalogue.

If You Loved Of Dreams and Poison, Read These Next

Three land closest. Of Tides and Snow is the other Happily Ever After Dark entry on our list — same author, same fairytale-retelling frame, pirate captain instead of a dragon. Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely by Elsie Hawthorne is the other dark romantasy here whose cliffhanger already has its answer published. And Unbound by Midnight by Amanda Austen is the lighter fairytale option if the darkness is what gives you pause. For more in the same band, browse our sapphic romantasy on Kindle Unlimited guide or the full run of book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Of Dreams and Poison welds Sleeping Beauty to Robin Hood and gets a genuine moral engine out of it — a protagonist who can keep her oath or save the woman she loves, not both. The trope stack is dense and delivered without embarrassment, the heat is top-band, the shadow magic and dragons do what readers came for, and the pacing is right because the book knows it is half of a story. Against that: it ends hard, nothing on the cover warns you it is a duology, and 35 written reviews is a thin base for a 4.42 average. Worth borrowing — with part two in the same session. Check Of Dreams and Poison on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Of Dreams and Poison ranks as a dense, well-engineered indie dark fairytale — morally interesting and generous with its tropes, held back by an unsignposted cliffhanger, and best approached as the first half of a duology you borrow whole.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

✓ 4.42 average across 369 Goodreads ratings
✓ 4.7 on Amazon across roughly 274 ratings
✓ Two fairytales combined into a real moral bind
✓ Hard cliffhanger with no packaging warning

Romance ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

✓ Oath-versus-vow gives the love real cost
✓ Fated mates delivered as promised
✓ Protagonist accepts no happy ending for herself
✓ Resolution belongs entirely to part two

Characters ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

✓ Morally grey lead with incompatible obligations
✓ Rosemary functions as more than a sleeper
✓ Choices carry genuine consequence
✓ Only 35 reviews to corroborate depth

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

✓ Pacing called perfect for a duology
✓ Five-word premise carries the structure
✓ No padding toward the sequel
✓ Small written base limits confidence

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

✓ Readers report being scared to reach the end
✓ Self-sacrificial promise taken seriously
✓ Ending drove immediate demand for part two
✓ Emotional payoff deferred by design

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

✓ Billed as high-heat by the author
✓ Marked 18+ throughout
✓ Delicious spice, per readers, without dissent
✓ No romance.io entry to corroborate a band

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Hard cliffhanger confirmed by readers
✓ Part two published and also on Kindle Unlimited
✓ Duology structure makes the break deliberate
✓ Nothing on the cover signals it is half a story

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ Duology invites a reread before part two
✓ Trope density rewards a second pass
✓ Kindle Unlimited makes re-borrowing free
✓ No audio edition for a second format

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August 16, 2026 0

Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely by Elsie Hawthorne book cover

Verdict: A cursed-scribe dark romantasy with a genuinely inventive nightmare love interest and a queernormative world, ending on a cliffhanger that — unusually for this list — has already been answered by a well-rated sequel.

Best for: Readers who want dark fantasy with twists rather than grimness, who like a love interest who is unsettling by design, and who want a duet they can finish in two borrows.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — no romance.io entry; readers foreground plot, atmosphere and dread over explicit content)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.2/5 — a 4.35 Goodreads average, with relationship development the one thing readers wanted more of)

Tropes: Cursed heroine, mysterious protector, dark magic, possessive love interest, library setting, queernormative world, touch-her-and-die, black cat energy, twists, duet.

Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely is book one of Elsie Hawthorne’s Heart of the Library duet and the opening of her A Curse of Fallen Stars series, a self-published dark sapphic fantasy romance published in August 2025, in which a scribe called Lorel — ten years into keeping her head down — opens the wrong book and wakes cursed, without her voice, without her memory, and with a dark mark spreading across her.

It holds a 4.35 average across 391 Goodreads ratings and 106 written reviews, against 4.5 across roughly 293 Amazon ratings. The review-to-rating ratio is high and the reviews are enthusiastic in a specific way — readers keep describing being surprised, which is a harder thing to earn than being impressed. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely About?

The world is queernormative, and Hawthorne uses that structurally rather than decoratively. When nobody has to explain or defend who they love, the entire book’s tension is free to come from the curse, the Library and the thing that has taken an interest in Lorel. That is a straightforward efficiency and it is why this reads as dark fantasy first.

The love interest is the design choice worth naming. She is described by the author’s own framing as a nightmare, and by readers as black cat energy with touch-her-and-die vibes — a protector who is genuinely frightening rather than a brooding man-shaped danger who turns out to be soft. Lorel, meanwhile, is not a chosen one. She is an employee who wanted to be left alone.

What Makes This Dark Sapphic Romantasy Work

The twists: Readers report being continuously surprised by the events, which is the single most repeated compliment in the review section.
A nightmare as a love interest: Unsettling by design and never sanded down. Touch-her-and-die is a reader’s own phrasing, offered approvingly.
Plot beyond the romance: A four-star reviewer notes there is enough going on besides the romance to keep the pages turning, which is rare praise in this category.
Atmosphere: Beautifully atmospheric is a direct quote, and the Library setting does a lot of the work.
The duet is finished: Book two arrived in January 2026 and rates higher than this one, so the cliffhanger is already answered.

Book Synopsis

Lorel has spent a decade being unremarkable on purpose. Ten years as a scribe in the Library, doing the work, keeping her head down, drawing no attention from anyone who might have opinions about her. It is not ambition, it is strategy, and for ten years it has held.

Then she opens the wrong book. What comes out of it takes her voice and most of her memory, and leaves behind a dark mark that begins to spread across her body at a rate that suggests a deadline. A woman who has organised her entire life around not being noticed is now visibly, progressively cursed, in a building full of people whose business is knowing things.

The attention she has spent ten years avoiding arrives all at once, and the most dangerous portion of it belongs to the Librarian. She is not safe, she is not kind in any way Lorel can rely on, and she is extremely interested. What follows is Lorel fighting for her life with no voice, no memory and no idea which of the things circling her intends to help. The question is not whether the curse can be broken. It is what the Librarian wants in exchange for breaking it.

My Review

The love interest is the reason to read this. Dark romance has a standing problem: it advertises a dangerous partner and then, somewhere around the midpoint, reveals that she was misunderstood and is actually just guarded. Hawthorne writes a nightmare and keeps her a nightmare. Readers reach for the same shorthand independently — black cat energy, touch-her-and-die — and they are describing a figure who stays genuinely unsettling while also being the person Lorel is falling for. That is difficult and it is the book’s real achievement.

The second strength is that it is a plot, not a mood. A four-star reviewer makes the point exactly: there is enough going on besides the romance to keep the pages turning, wanting to know what is happening and what happens next. Another describes being continuously surprised by the events. For a debut-scale indie romantasy those are unusual compliments; most books in this bracket are atmospheric and predictable, and this one is atmospheric and not.

Taking Lorel’s voice is the choice I keep coming back to. A protagonist who cannot speak, in a library, whose profession is writing things down — that is a curse designed around the character rather than applied to her, and it forces the book to solve problems without dialogue. It is the kind of decision that suggests an author thinking structurally rather than atmospherically.

The consistent limitation is the romance itself. The clearest version comes from a five-star review, which is what makes it credible: I maybe would have preferred more relationship development, but I am feral for them anyway. That is a reader telling you the connection is compelling but under-built — the pull works, the accumulation of intimacy does not entirely. In a 298-page book carrying this much plot, something had to give, and this is what gave.

My honest note: A dark fantasy with a properly frightening love interest and a curse built around its protagonist. The romance is the thinnest part of a book that is otherwise better than its rating base suggests.

Element	In Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely
Central relationship	Lorel, a cursed scribe without voice or memory, and the Librarian who takes an interest in her
Core tropes	Cursed heroine, mysterious protector, dark magic, possessive love interest, queernormative world
Setting	The Library — where Lorel has worked for a decade and where she opens the wrong book
Heat level	3/5 — no romance.io entry; readers foreground dread and plot over explicit content
Series	Heart of the Library book 1 of 2 — cliffhanger; book two arrived January 2026 and rates higher
Content notes	Curses and body horror, loss of voice and memory, possessive dynamics, violence; the author publishes full content warnings on her website

How Dark and Spicy Is Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely?

Around a 3/5 on heat, and the sourcing needs saying: romance.io has no entry for this title, so there is no catalogued band. Across 106 written reviews the explicit content is barely the subject — readers talk about twists, atmosphere, the curse and the love interest’s menace. It is a dark fantasy with a romance in it rather than a spice-forward read.

The darkness is the part to calibrate for. The curse involves losing voice and memory and a mark spreading across the body, the love interest is deliberately frightening, and Hawthorne publishes full content warnings on her own website — which is worth checking if any of that is a concern, and is more than most indie authors provide. For dark sapphic fantasy at higher heat, Her Spell That Binds Me is the 5/5 comparison, and The Fae Queen’s Captive goes darker in less space.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a love interest who stays frightening, you like being surprised by a plot, queernormative worldbuilding appeals to you, and you would rather read a finished duet than start an open series.

You may want to skip it if: you need the romance to be the main event, you want the relationship built rather than felt, body horror and loss of self are hard limits, or you want top-band heat.

In short: excellent dark fantasy with a thin romance inside it, and a sequel already waiting.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

This is one of the better-organised indie launches on our Kindle Unlimited list. Hawthorne ran an ARC round before the August 2025 release — several reviews open by thanking her for inclusion — and has since run a Kickstarter for special editions of the duet, which is a level of production planning most self-published romantasy does not attempt. 106 written reviews against 391 ratings is a high engagement rate, and the reviews are noticeably descriptive rather than reactive. No trade coverage, no Reddit footprint, and no audiobook on Libro.fm in any edition.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The twists, first and most consistently — readers describe being continuously surprised by the events, and one calls the whole thing insane in an admiring way. Second, the love interest, discussed in shorthand that recurs independently across reviews: black cat energy, touch-her-and-die vibes. Third, the balance of plot to romance, with a four-star reviewer noting approvingly that there is enough going on besides the romance to keep the pages turning. Fourth, atmosphere — beautifully atmospheric is a direct quote from an ARC reader, and the Library setting gets credited for it. Several readers mention discovering it through reader groups rather than any algorithm, which fits the launch profile.

What readers argue about and complain about: Relationship development, and the criticism is unusually clean because it comes from the top of the rating range. A five-star reviewer says outright that they would maybe have preferred more relationship development, then adds that they are feral for the pair anyway. That is the whole finding: the attraction lands, the accumulation does not, and readers forgive it because everything around it is working. Second, the cliffhanger, which readers flag as a fact rather than a grievance — the common formulation is that book one ends on a bit of a cliffhanger and book two is coming. Nobody in the review base is angry about it. There is no dominant negative theme beyond that, which at 4.35 across 391 ratings is a fair reflection of a book that mostly does what it set out to do.

The series question everyone should ask first: This is the strongest series position on our Kindle Unlimited list. Heart of the Library is a duet, not an open-ended series; book one ends on a cliffhanger, and book two — Her Whisper so Soft and Bitter — was published in January 2026, holds a 4.48 Goodreads average across 178 ratings, and is also on Kindle Unlimited. So the cliffhanger is answered, the answer rates higher than the setup, and the whole story costs two borrow slots. Compared with the four unfinished cliffhanger series elsewhere on this list, that is a materially better proposition, and it is the main reason to pick this one up now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely end on a cliffhanger?

Yes, but it is already answered. Book two of the Heart of the Library duet, Her Whisper so Soft and Bitter, was published in January 2026, holds a 4.48 Goodreads average and is also on Kindle Unlimited — so the whole story costs two borrow slots.

How spicy is Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely?

Around a 3/5, and we cannot source it precisely. romance.io has no entry, and across 106 reviews readers discuss twists, atmosphere and the love interest’s menace rather than the explicit content. It reads as dark fantasy with a romance in it.

Is the love interest in Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely actually dangerous?

Yes, and she stays that way. The author frames her as a nightmare and readers independently reach for the same shorthand — black cat energy, touch-her-and-die. She is not revealed to be secretly soft.

Is there a content warning list for Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely?

Yes. Elsie Hawthorne publishes full content warnings on her own website, which is more than most indie authors provide. The book involves curses, body horror, and the loss of voice and memory.

Is Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely a romance or a fantasy?

Closer to a fantasy with a romance in it. Readers praise having enough plot besides the romance to keep turning pages, and the most common reservation is wanting more relationship development.

Is Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes, and so is the sequel. It carried the Kindle Unlimited badge on its Amazon listing when we checked in August 2026. Availability changes without notice, so confirm the badge before you borrow.

If You Loved Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely, Read These Next

Three land closest. Her Spell That Binds Me by Luna Oblonsky is the higher-heat version of dark sapphic fantasy with a magical bond at the centre. Will It Hurt? by Lily X is the closest match for atmospheric urban fantasy where the plot outweighs the romance. And The Fae Queen’s Captive by Sierra Simone goes darker and shorter if the menace is what drew you. For more in the same band, browse our sapphic romantasy on Kindle Unlimited guide or the full run of book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely writes a love interest who is genuinely frightening and never softens her, builds a curse designed around its own protagonist rather than applied to her, and surprises readers repeatedly across 298 pages — three things most indie dark romantasy does not manage. The queernormative world frees the tension to come from the plot, and the author publishes proper content warnings. Against that: the relationship is the least developed thing in the book, and even five-star readers say so. Worth borrowing, and worth borrowing both halves — the duet is finished and the sequel rates higher. Check Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely ranks as a well-constructed indie dark sapphic fantasy — inventive in its curse and uncompromising in its love interest, held back by an under-built romance, and best approached as the first half of a duet you can finish immediately.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

✓ 4.35 average across 391 Goodreads ratings
✓ 4.5 on Amazon across roughly 293 ratings
✓ Readers repeatedly report being surprised
✓ Relationship development named as the shortfall

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ Love interest stays frightening throughout
✓ Pull between them lands immediately
✓ Possessive dynamic written without softening
✓ Even five-star readers wanted more development

Characters ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

✓ Lorel is an employee, not a chosen one
✓ Curse designed around her profession and voice
✓ Librarian never sanded into someone safe
✓ Supporting cast thin beside the two leads

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

✓ Continuously surprising, per multiple readers
✓ Beautifully atmospheric, per an ARC reader
✓ Voiceless protagonist forces non-dialogue solutions
✓ Romance beats compressed to fit the plot

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

✓ Losing voice and memory is a personal horror
✓ Spreading mark supplies a real deadline
✓ Queernormative world frees tension for the curse
✓ Emotional payoff deferred to book two

Heat Level ★★★☆☆ 3/5

✓ Explicit content present but not foregrounded
✓ Dread prioritised over spice by readers
✓ No romance.io entry to corroborate a band
✓ Heat barely discussed across 106 reviews

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

✓ Cliffhanger, but already answered
✓ Book two published January 2026 at 4.48
✓ Sequel also on Kindle Unlimited
✓ No resolution within a single borrow

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ Twists reward a second pass
✓ Library atmosphere holds up on return
✓ Kindle Unlimited makes re-borrowing free
✓ No audio edition for a second format

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August 16, 2026 0

Divine Deception Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: The sequel that turns Blood Royale into a throuple, rated higher than book one and divided down the middle on whether the third woman was written in or forced in — with editing errors nobody should have shipped.

Best for: Readers who finished Eternal Captive, who want polyamorous vampire romance, and who can live with typos, wrong names and another cliffhanger.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — romance.io rates it explicit and plentiful; readers score it around 4)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 4.07 Goodreads average carrying a genuine split on the polyamory and a real copy-editing problem)

Tropes: Polyamory, why-choose, vampire romance, on the run, triple first-person POV, found family, dark romance, cliffhanger, series continuation, court pursuit.

Divine Deception is book two of Elle Mae’s Blood Royale series, a self-published dark sapphic vampire romance published in March 2025, in which Vesper, Aurelia and a third woman called Cedar flee the Castle family and land somewhere worse — and in which the central couple from Eternal Captive becomes a three.

It holds a 4.07 average across 891 Goodreads ratings and 60 written reviews, against 4.4 across roughly 523 Amazon ratings. Notably that is higher than book one’s 3.90, which is the opposite of what you would expect given how many readers arrived at this book angry about the change. The reviews explain both facts. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Divine Deception About?

This is a road book and a structural experiment at once. The escape from book one puts three women on the run together, and Mae writes it in triple first-person — each of the three gets her own POV chapters, which is the technical commitment that separates a genuine throuple from a couple with a guest. Whether that commitment pays off is the thing readers disagree about.

At 296 pages it moves fast, and it is chased. The Castle family is behind them, the witches who patch them up are not a refuge, and the plot keeps handing the three of them somewhere new to be in danger. It also ends where book one ended: on a cliffhanger.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

Triple first-person POV: All three women narrate. That is a real structural choice and it is what makes the throuple readable as three relationships rather than one plus an addition.
Poly representation that lands for poly readers: A polyamorous reviewer calls the representation indescribable and says Cedar rounds the dynamic out rather than intruding on it.
Aurelia: She has become the fan favourite — the reviews are full of people claiming her, and her anger after the escape is written with real teeth.
Character evolution: Readers who enjoyed it say the characters continue to evolve in interesting ways, which is the thing sequels most often fail at.
Pace: 296 pages of pursuit. Nobody accuses this one of dawdling.

Book Synopsis

They got out. That is where this book starts — not with a rescue to plan but with the aftermath of one, three women in a shack somewhere with witches doing what they can and a family behind them that does not accept losses. Escape is the beginning of the problem rather than the end of it.

Aurelia wakes up angry. Not gratefully, not tenderly — angry enough to swing at the people who saved her, which is a more honest way to write someone coming out of what she came out of than most books manage. Vesper has her own reckoning to do with what she is and what her family expects. And Cedar is there, which is the fact the whole book turns on: a third woman inside a relationship that was a pair when the last book ended.

The Castle family does not stop. What the three of them run into next is worse than what they left, and the pursuit gives the book its shape — a chase with three narrators, each of whom sees the other two differently. The question driving it is not whether they will be caught. It is whether three people who ended up together under pressure are actually a relationship, or just three survivors of the same event.

My Review

The structural decision here is braver than the book gets credit for. Moving an established couple into a throuple mid-series is a commercially risky thing to do — you will lose readers, and Mae did — and doing it in triple first-person POV rather than keeping the original two narrators is the version that takes it seriously. Each of the three women gets to be a person with her own account of what is happening. That is the correct way to write polyamory and it is not the cheap way.

The evidence that it works for the audience it is aimed at is unusually clean. A polyamorous reviewer describes the representation as indescribable and says Vesper and Aurelia easily fit Cedar into their dynamic and that she rounds them out. When a reader from the represented group says the representation is good, that carries more weight than any amount of general enthusiasm.

The evidence that it does not work for everyone is equally clean, and it is specific rather than squeamish. Another reviewer says the throuple element came completely out of left field and that the book seemed to focus primarily on how Vesper wanted Cedar while Aurelia had no choice but to comply. That is a criticism about consent and agency inside the relationship, not about polyamory as such, and it deserves to be stated in those terms. Two readers, same pages, opposite conclusions about whether Aurelia chose this.

What is not a split is the editing. One reviewer names it precisely: obvious errors, wrong names, wrong POV chapter headings. In a book whose entire structural conceit is that three different women narrate, a wrong POV heading is not a typo — it breaks the mechanism the book is built on. There is also a recurring complaint that the explicit scenes stop sounding like the characters, described as hot for the sake of being hot without keeping the tone and voice of the actual people involved. And the structure draws fire: cliffhanger again, and a sense that the plot is being stretched deliberately toward more sequels, with one reader noting the first two books could have been one.

My honest note: A genuinely committed piece of polyamorous romance shipped without a proofread. If you want the poly and you already know these characters, it delivers something rare. If you came from book one wanting Vesper and Aurelia alone, this is the book that ends that.

Element	In Divine Deception
Central relationship	Vesper, Aurelia & Cedar — the book one couple becomes a three, narrated by all of them
Core tropes	Polyamory, why-choose, vampire romance, on the run, triple first-person POV, found family
Setting	On the run from the Castle family, through witches and worse, after the escape that ended book one
Heat level	5/5 — explicit and plentiful per romance.io; readers score it nearer 4
Series	Blood Royale book 2 — ends on another cliffhanger; the series is ongoing
Content notes	Explicit sexual content, polyamory, violence and pursuit, injury and recovery, coercive family dynamics

How Spicy Is Divine Deception?

romance.io files it as explicit and plentiful, its top band, while readers who score spice separately tend to put it at four out of five — slightly below book one on their own scales. Either way the content is frequent and on the page, now across three people rather than two.

The thing worth flagging is a craft objection rather than a content one. More than one reader reports that the explicit scenes stop sounding like the characters — written to be hot rather than to be these particular women, losing the tone and voice established elsewhere in the book. That is a specific and unusual complaint and it recurs. For the same heat band with the voice held steady, Green-Eyed Monster is the stronger book, and Blood Marks runs vampire polyamory as a standalone if the three-way dynamic is what drew you.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you are polyamorous or read why-choose by preference, you finished Eternal Captive and want the arc continued, you like a pursuit plot, and Aurelia is the reason you are here.

You may want to skip it if: you wanted Vesper and Aurelia as a couple, obvious copy-editing errors ruin a book for you, another cliffhanger is a dealbreaker, or you need the sex scenes to sound like the characters having them.

In short: committed polyamorous romance with a proofreading problem and a stretched plot.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The most interesting number attached to this book is a comparison. Eternal Captive holds 3.90 on Goodreads; this holds 4.07. The sequel that made the controversial change is rated higher than the book that set it up, which tells you something specific about how the damage distributed: readers who objected to the throuple went back and downgraded book one rather than rating book two, while the readers who stayed liked what they got. There is no trade coverage and no Reddit presence, and no audiobook on Libro.fm; discovery is Kindle Unlimited plus an author fanbase that arrived from Contract Bound.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The polyamory, when it lands, lands hard. A polyamorous reviewer describes the representation as indescribable and specifies why — Vesper and Aurelia fit Cedar into their dynamic and she rounds them out rather than displacing anyone. Second, Aurelia, who has become the character people claim in their reviews and whose waking-up-furious scene after the escape gets singled out. Third, the triple first-person structure, which readers note as a genuine commitment rather than a gimmick. Fourth, momentum: at 296 pages with a pursuit driving it, nobody calls this one slow.

What readers argue about and complain about: The throuple, and the disagreement is about agency rather than about polyamory. The clearest negative account says the element came completely out of left field and that the book focuses primarily on Vesper wanting Cedar while Aurelia had no choice but to comply. Set that directly against the polyamorous reader who found the same dynamic well built, and you have the genuine split of the book. Second, and not a split at all: editing. Obvious errors, wrong names, wrong POV chapter headings — in a book with three narrators, a mislabelled POV chapter is a structural failure rather than a typo. Third, the explicit scenes losing the characters’ voices. Fourth, structure: another cliffhanger, a plot several readers feel is being stretched toward further sequels, and one reader’s blunt assessment that the first two books could have been one.

The series question everyone should ask first: Blood Royale is ongoing and this is book two of an unfinished series that has now ended twice on cliffhangers. Do not start here — read Eternal Captive first, and go in knowing that the couple becomes a three in this volume, because that is the single fact most likely to determine whether you should read the series at all. If polyamory is a draw, this is one of the more committed pieces of why-choose sapphic paranormal on Kindle Unlimited. If you want a two-person romance, stop after book one and treat its cliffhanger as an ending.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Divine Deception turn the couple into a throuple?

Yes. Vesper and Aurelia become three with the addition of Cedar, and all three narrate in first person. It is the defining change of the book and the thing readers disagree about most.

Is the polyamory in Divine Deception well written?

Readers split on it. A polyamorous reviewer calls the representation indescribable and says Cedar rounds the dynamic out. Another says it came out of left field and focuses on Vesper wanting Cedar while Aurelia had no choice but to comply. The disagreement is about agency, not about polyamory.

Does Divine Deception end on a cliffhanger?

Yes, again. Book one ended on one and so does this, and the series is ongoing. Several readers feel the plot is being stretched deliberately toward further sequels.

Do I need to read Eternal Captive first?

Yes. This continues directly from the escape that ends book one, and the emotional weight assumes you know these characters. Both are on Kindle Unlimited.

How spicy is Divine Deception?

romance.io rates it explicit and plentiful, its top band, while readers scoring spice separately put it nearer four out of five. A recurring craft complaint is that the scenes stop sounding like the characters.

Is Divine Deception well edited?

No, and this is the one thing nobody defends. Reviewers report obvious errors including wrong character names and wrong POV chapter headings — which in a book with three narrators breaks the structure it is built on.

If You Loved Divine Deception, Read These Next

Three land closest. Blood Marks by Ruby Scott is the direct recommendation if the polyamory is what worked — vampire romance with a poly configuration, as a complete standalone with no cliffhanger. Not So Yours Truly by Clio Evans runs a W/W/W throuple at novella length with consent foregrounded, which is the corrective if agency was your concern here. And Contract Bound is the author’s strongest book and a two-person romance. For more in the same band, browse our sapphic romantasy on Kindle Unlimited guide or the full run of book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Divine Deception does something most series would not risk: it turns its couple into a throuple and commits, giving all three women first-person narration rather than treating the third as a guest. Poly readers say it works, Aurelia has become the series’ best character, and the pursuit plot keeps 296 pages moving. Against that: readers who felt Aurelia was carried along rather than choosing have a legitimate case, the explicit scenes lose the characters’ voices, and the book shipped with wrong names and mislabelled POV headings that break its own structure. Worth borrowing if the polyamory is the draw and book one left you invested. Check Divine Deception on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Divine Deception ranks as a committed indie polyamorous vampire romance — structurally braver than its series peers, undermined by copy-editing and a stretched plot, and best approached as book two of an ongoing why-choose story rather than as a couple’s continuation.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ 4.07 average across 891 Goodreads ratings
✓ Higher than book one’s 3.90 despite the change
✓ 4.4 on Amazon across roughly 523 ratings
✓ Wrong names and POV headings shipped in the text

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ Triple first-person commits to three relationships
✓ Poly readers report strong representation
✓ Aurelia’s anger written with real teeth
✓ Agency of one lead disputed by reviewers

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

✓ Aurelia has become the series’ standout
✓ Characters continue to evolve, per readers
✓ Each of the three narrates in her own voice
✓ Cedar’s arrival feels abrupt to some readers

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3/5

✓ Pursuit plot keeps the pace up
✓ Structural ambition of three narrators
✓ Obvious editing errors named by reviewers
✓ Explicit scenes lose the characters’ voices

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ Waking-up-furious scene singled out by readers
✓ Escape aftermath handled without sentiment
✓ Poly readers report a strong personal response
✓ Stretched plot dilutes the stakes

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
✓ Frequent and on the page across three people
✓ Readers score it nearer 4 on their own scales
✓ Voice slips during the explicit scenes

Ending ★★★☆☆ 2.9/5

✓ Second consecutive cliffhanger
✓ Series ongoing with no resolution yet
✓ Readers say books one and two could be one
✓ No complete arc in a single borrow

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ 296 pages makes a return cheap
✓ Kindle Unlimited makes re-borrowing free
✓ Poly readers report rereading for the dynamic
✓ No audio edition and no resolved ending

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August 16, 2026 0

Eternal Captive Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A genuinely slow-burn vampire-and-hunter romance with vile villains and top-band heat, undercut by a major cliffhanger and a sequel that changes the couple in a way readers did not sign up for.

Best for: Readers who want the slow burn to actually be slow, who like their antagonists irredeemable, and who will check what happens in book two before committing to book one.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — romance.io rates it explicit and plentiful)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.90 Goodreads average pulled down by the cliffhanger and by readers arriving from Contract Bound expecting the same book)

Tropes: Enemies to lovers, vampire and hunter, princess and bodyguard, prophecy, slow burn, sent-to-kill-you, captivity, court villains, dark romance, cliffhanger.

Eternal Captive is book one of Elle Mae’s Blood Royale series, a self-published dark sapphic vampire romance published in April 2024 and set in the same world as Contract Bound with an entirely new cast, in which a prophecy names the hunter who will kill the vampire princess Vesper — and then puts the two of them in the same room for 318 pages.

It holds a 3.90 average across 2,109 Goodreads ratings and 251 written reviews, against 4.4 across roughly 1,000 Amazon ratings. The reviews are unusually clear about what they liked and unusually specific about what went wrong, and the biggest complaint is not about this book at all — it is about what the next one does. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Eternal Captive About?

This is enemies-to-lovers built on the oldest reliable engine in the subgenre: one character has been assigned, fated or contracted to kill the other. Elle Mae adds rank on top of it — Vesper is a princess, Aurelia is the hunter, and the power in the room keeps changing hands depending on whether you count status or capability. That instability is the point, and it is why the slow burn works rather than stalling.

The book stays close to both leads and gives the court around them real menace. Readers single out the villains specifically, which is rare: in most romantasy the antagonists exist to be obstacles, and here they land as genuinely unpleasant people doing genuinely unpleasant things. That gives the romance something to be measured against.

What Makes This Dark Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

The slow burn is actually slow: Readers stretch the word out in their reviews — it is the first thing four and five-star reviewers mention, and nobody accuses the book of rushing.
The villains: Described as atrocious and vile by readers who mean it as praise. The antagonists have teeth, which raises the stakes for the romance.
Banter: Named as a strength even in the negative reviews, which is the most reliable kind of evidence there is.
The premise does the work: Vampire princess and the hunter prophesied to kill her is a clean, self-explaining hook, and readers quote it back approvingly.
Tension: Reviewers pair tension and spice in the same breath, which suggests the heat is arriving where the story has built pressure for it.

Book Synopsis

Vesper’s life was decided before she had any say in it. A prophecy named the manner of her death and the hand that would deliver it, and a vampire court does not treat that kind of prediction as a curiosity — it treats it as a scheduling problem. She has grown up inside a plan built around an ending somebody else foresaw, which is a specific and corrosive way to become cruel.

Aurelia is the hunter. She is cold in the way people become cold when the job requires it, and she arrives in Vesper’s orbit carrying the weight of what she is supposedly there to do. The court knows. Vesper knows. That shared knowledge is the room the entire book takes place in, and it is why nothing between them can be casual: every conversation is happening on top of a prediction that one of them will kill the other.

What follows is a long, deliberate circling. The vampires around Vesper are worse than she is and considerably worse than Aurelia expected, which complicates the simple version of the assignment. The prophecy does not go away, the court does not become safe, and the question driving the second half is not whether these two will want each other — that arrives early and stays — but what either of them can do about a future that has already been written down.

My Review

The slow burn is the achievement here and it deserves to be said first. A great many books marketed as slow burn are books where the couple sleeps together in chapter six and then have feelings about it, and readers have become cynical about the label for good reason. This one earns it — the reviews that like it stretch the word out, half-joking, and that is the sound of a promise being kept. When the tension does resolve, it resolves against 300 pages of pressure rather than a chapter of it.

The second strength is the villains, and it is worth naming because it is unusual. Readers call them atrocious and vile with obvious enjoyment. Most romantasy antagonists are functional; these ones are genuinely unpleasant, and their unpleasantness gives Vesper somewhere to stand. A princess who is cruel because her court is worse is a more interesting character than a princess who is cruel because dark romance requires it.

The complaints are specific, and the loudest one is not really about this book. Book one ends on a major cliffhanger — readers say so directly — and the reader who then picks up the sequel discovers that the relationship becomes a throuple with one of the side characters. There is a review on Goodreads from someone who was enjoying this at four stars, went straight into book two, found that out, and came back to downgrade book one to one star. Whatever you think of that as a rating decision, it is a real thing to know before you start, and no marketing copy anywhere will tell you.

The second complaint is craft, and it comes from the author’s own readers. Several people who loved Contract Bound describe this as clunky by comparison, with spice that felt like it was there because the genre expected it rather than because the scene needed it, and a plot that happens to the characters rather than being driven by them. That last phrase is the sharpest version of the problem: Vesper and Aurelia spend a lot of the book reacting.

My honest note: A well-built slow burn with the best villains in Elle Mae’s catalogue, sitting inside a series that changes the deal in book two. If the couple is why you are here, find out what happens to it before you commit.

Element	In Eternal Captive
Central relationship	Vesper & Aurelia — a vampire princess and the hunter a prophecy says will kill her
Core tropes	Enemies to lovers, vampire and hunter, princess and bodyguard, prophecy, slow burn, court intrigue
Setting	The vampire court of the Contract Bound world, with an entirely new cast
Heat level	5/5 — explicit and plentiful, per romance.io’s top band
Series	Blood Royale book 1 — ends on a major cliffhanger; the sequel turns the couple into a throuple
Content notes	Explicit sexual content, graphic violence, captivity, court cruelty, blood and feeding, prophesied death

How Dark and Spicy Is Eternal Captive?

A 5/5. romance.io files it in its top heat band, explicit and plentiful, and readers pair spice with tension when they describe it — the scenes land where the slow burn has built pressure rather than at regular intervals. The darkness is real but sits mostly with the court rather than between the leads: the villains are where the cruelty lives, and Vesper’s own hardness reads as a product of that environment.

The thing worth flagging is a dissenting note rather than a content warning. At least one reader who loved the author’s earlier work found the explicit scenes here felt obligatory rather than earned — present because the genre expects them. That is a minority view and it sits against a majority who rate the heat highly, but it is a specific enough criticism to be worth carrying. For the same band with the tension better distributed, Contract Bound is the author’s stronger book, and Blood Marks runs comparable vampire darkness with a slower spice curve.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a slow burn that genuinely takes its time, you enjoy antagonists who are properly vile, you like the sent-to-kill-you setup, and you are reading the whole series rather than one book.

You may want to skip it if: a cliffhanger is a dealbreaker, you want a two-person HEA and would resent the couple changing shape in the sequel, you need protagonists who drive the plot rather than absorb it, or you are coming from Contract Bound expecting the same level of polish.

In short: a strong slow burn with excellent villains, attached to a series decision you should learn about in advance.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The discourse around this book runs almost entirely through Elle Mae’s existing readership, and that shapes everything about how it is received. There is no trade coverage, no Reddit footprint of any size and no viral moment. What there is instead is a fanbase that arrived from Contract Bound — a book with 2,500 Amazon ratings and a strong reputation — and is measuring this against it in nearly every review. That comparison is the single most important context for the 3.90 average: a substantial share of the criticism is relative rather than absolute.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The slow burn, first and by a distance. Reviewers stretch the word out for emphasis and treat it as the book’s defining quality. Second, the villains, who are described as atrocious and vile by readers who plainly enjoyed them; antagonists with real menace are uncommon enough in this subgenre to be worth the specific credit. Third, the premise itself — sapphic vampire and vampire hunter, princess and bodyguard, sent to kill you — which readers quote back in exactly that shorthand because it is a clean hook. Notably, banter gets praised even inside two and three-star reviews, which makes it the most reliably verified strength the book has.

What readers argue about and complain about: The ending, above everything, and specifically what comes after it. Book one closes on a major cliffhanger, and the readers who went straight into the sequel found that the central relationship becomes a throuple with a side character. At least one reviewer downgraded this book to one star on that basis, having enjoyed it at four. Whether that is fair to book one is arguable; that it is information a reader should have before starting is not. Second: craft, from the author’s own audience. Clunky is the word used, along with the observation that the plot happens to the characters rather than being driven by them, and that the explicit scenes sometimes feel obligatory. Third, and quieter, a DNF cluster around the halfway mark from readers who could not get invested. The genuine split is between readers who took this as episode one of a longer story and readers who took it as a vampire romance with a couple at the centre. The second group is where the low ratings come from.

The series question everyone should ask first: Blood Royale is ongoing and this is book one. It ends on a major cliffhanger, so a single borrow will not give you a finished story. More importantly, the relationship configuration changes in book two — the couple becomes a throuple — which is a structural change rather than a plot twist, and it is the thing most likely to determine whether you should start the series at all. If you want a two-person romance and that is non-negotiable, this is the wrong series and knowing that now saves you 318 pages. If polyamory is a draw rather than a problem, the reverse applies and the cliffhanger stops mattering.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Eternal Captive end on a cliffhanger?

Yes, and readers describe it as a major one. It is book one of the Blood Royale series and does not resolve its central situation, so a single borrow will not give you a finished story.

Does the couple in Eternal Captive stay a couple?

Not in the sequel. Readers who continued the series report that the relationship becomes a throuple with one of the side characters. If you want a two-person romance, that is worth knowing before you start book one.

How spicy is Eternal Captive?

A 5/5. romance.io rates it explicit and plentiful, and reviewers pair the spice with the tension the slow burn builds. A minority of readers felt the scenes were obligatory rather than earned.

Is Eternal Captive a sequel to Contract Bound?

No. It is set in the same world with an entirely new cast, so you can read it first. Many readers arrive from Contract Bound and measure it against that book, which is a large part of why its average is lower.

Is Eternal Captive on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. It carried the Kindle Unlimited badge on its Amazon listing when we checked in August 2026. Availability changes without notice, so confirm the badge before you borrow.

Is Eternal Captive really a slow burn?

Yes, and unusually so. It is the single most-praised element in the reviews, and readers who are cynical about the label say this one earns it.

If You Loved Eternal Captive, Read These Next

Three land closest. Contract Bound by the same author is the stronger book by most readers’ account — same world, same hunter-and-vampire engine, tighter execution. Blood Marks by Ruby Scott runs comparable vampire darkness as a standalone with a complete arc, which is the direct answer to the cliffhanger problem. And She Came for Blood by Darva Green pairs a vampire queen with a bodyguard infiltrator at the same heat band. For more in the same band, browse our sapphic romantasy on Kindle Unlimited guide or the full run of book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Eternal Captive sets out to write a properly patient enemies-to-lovers vampire romance and gets the hardest part right: the slow burn is slow, the villains are genuinely vile, and the banter survives even in the reviews that dislike the book. Against that: it ends on a major cliffhanger, the plot tends to happen to its protagonists rather than the reverse, and the sequel changes the couple in a way that a two-person-romance reader will not want. Worth borrowing if you are starting a series rather than reading a book. Check Eternal Captive on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Eternal Captive ranks as a patient indie sapphic vampire romance — strong on tension and antagonists, held back by a passive plot and a cliffhanger, and best approached as the opening of a series you have already decided to finish.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ 3.90 average across 2,109 Goodreads ratings
✓ 4.4 on Amazon across roughly 1,000 ratings
✓ Slow burn and villains praised near-unanimously
✓ Cliffhanger plus a sequel that changes the couple

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

✓ Slow burn genuinely earns the label
✓ Tension sustained across 318 pages
✓ Banter praised even in negative reviews
✓ Configuration changes in book two

Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Vesper’s cruelty explained by her court
✓ Villains described as atrocious and vile
✓ Aurelia’s coldness has a stated cause
✓ Plot happens to the leads more than they drive it

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

✓ Banter is the most consistently verified strength
✓ Premise delivered cleanly in the opening
✓ Called clunky by the author’s own readers
✓ Weaker than Contract Bound by common consent

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

✓ Prophecy gives every scene a shadow
✓ Court menace raises the cost of the romance
✓ Readers report being hooked by the pairing
✓ DNF cluster reported around the halfway mark

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
✓ Spice arrives where tension has built
✓ Readers rate it highly and consistently
✓ A minority found the scenes obligatory

Ending ★★★☆☆ 2.9/5

✓ Major cliffhanger, confirmed by readers
✓ No resolved arc in a single borrow
✓ Series continues, so resolution exists
✓ Sequel alters the central relationship

Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Slow burn rewards knowing where it lands
✓ Kindle Unlimited makes re-borrowing free
✓ Villains hold up on a second pass
✓ Cliffhanger discourages standalone rereads

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August 16, 2026 0

The Princess’s Pet Review — Is It Worth Reading?

The Princess’s Pet by J.K. Jeffrey book cover

Verdict: A dark sapphic vampire romance with a genuinely uncomfortable soul-bond at its centre and 5/5 heat, undercut by line-level editing that a good share of readers could not get past.

Best for: Readers who want fated mates played as a problem rather than a promise, who are comfortable with dubious consent and BDSM on the page, and who can forgive unpolished prose for a premise that commits.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — romance.io rates it explicit and plentiful)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.95 Goodreads average with a recurring editing complaint the defenders keep having to answer)

Tropes: Fated mates, vampire and witch, power imbalance, captivity, D/s dynamics, royalty, class difference, dubious consent, found family, magical bond.

The Princess’s Pet is book one of J.K. Jeffrey’s two-book Soul Match series, a self-published sapphic paranormal fantasy romance published in April 2022 and set in a vampire society with rigid rank, where a half-witch discovers that the person the magic has chosen for her is a vampire princess who did not want to be chosen.

It holds a 3.95 average across 2,426 Goodreads ratings and 228 written reviews, and 4.4 across roughly 1,800 Amazon ratings — a gap of nearly half a star that is typical of the two platforms and worth reading as a signal rather than a contradiction. The written reviews split much harder than either number suggests, and they split on two different things: how the book is written, and how the relationship is built. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Princess’s Pet About?

This is dark romance wearing paranormal fantasy clothes, and the distinction matters. The vampire society here is stratified by blood and rank, which means every interaction between the leads carries a power differential the book never pretends is neutral. Fated mates is usually a reassurance trope — the magic says you belong together, so the tension is external. Jeffrey uses it the other way round. The bond is the source of the conflict, not the resolution of it.

The protagonist arrives without standing: a half-witch in a world that ranks her low and a bond she did not choose. The princess arrives with everything except the ability to refuse what the magic has decided, and treats that as an insult to be taken out on the nearest available person. The book stays close to the half-witch throughout, which is what makes the power imbalance legible rather than romantic — you are inside the person with less power for the whole of it.

What Makes This Dark Sapphic Vampire Romance Work

The bond as a problem: Readers who rate it highly consistently name the same thing — the soul match is resented before it is wanted, and the book makes you wait for the turn.
The world’s rank system: Even a two-star reviewer calls the setting original, describing the book as a blend of fantasy, BDSM and boarding-school magic. That is a real structural compliment inside a negative review.
It commits to the darkness: The listed content is violence and death, BDSM, sexual violence, dubious consent, blood, and emotional and physical abuse. Nothing here is a tease.
Heat that is structural: romance.io puts it in the top band, explicit and plentiful, and the sex is where the power dynamic gets negotiated rather than a break from the plot.
Pace: 292 pages. Readers who liked it use the phrase page-turner repeatedly, and the ones who finished it in a sitting say so.

Book Synopsis

In a society where vampires hold rank and everyone else is measured against them, a soul match is supposed to be the rarest good fortune a person can have. The magic identifies the one other person who completes you, and once both halves accept it, the bond is permanent. Nobody expects it to be a mistake. Nobody expects it to arrive across the widest status gap the world contains.

The half-witch at the centre of the book has spent her life being told what she is not: not fully witch, not vampire, not anything the hierarchy has a comfortable slot for. When the bond announces itself, it announces itself to a princess — and the princess responds to being magically claimed by someone beneath her the way a person responds to a humiliation. The book does not soften that first response. It sits in it, and it makes the half-witch live there, in a household that runs on rules she did not write and a bond she cannot switch off.

What follows is a negotiation conducted almost entirely through power. The princess has rank, court obligations and a temper. The half-witch has the bond, which turns out to be the only leverage in the building that a princess cannot overrule. The question driving the back half is not whether they will end up together — the magic already answered that — but whether anything the princess does can be walked back, and what the half-witch is willing to accept in exchange for a place she was never offered.

My Review

The premise is the reason this book has 2,426 Goodreads ratings and a sequel. Fated mates is one of the most over-served tropes in romantasy and almost always functions as reassurance — the universe has vouched for this relationship, so the obstacles have to come from somewhere else. Jeffrey makes the bond itself the obstacle, and then compounds it by making one half of it royalty and the other half a person the world has already decided is lesser. That is a genuinely good structural idea, and it is why the book keeps getting recommended in sapphic paranormal threads three years after publication.

The second thing it gets right is refusing to make the princess likeable early. A lot of dark romance announces its darkness and then quietly softens the antagonist by chapter six so the reader does not have to sit with anything. This does not do that. The cruelty is real, it lasts, and the reader is kept in the point of view of the person absorbing it. Whether that is a strength or a dealbreaker depends entirely on what you came for, which is why the reviews look the way they do.

The dominant criticism is not the darkness, though. It is the writing. Grammar and punctuation come up repeatedly enough that the book’s defenders open by rebutting it — one five-star review begins by telling you to ignore the earlier complaint about the grammar being so bad you cannot read it, which is not a thing you write unless that complaint is the first thing a browsing reader sees. That is the shape of the problem: not a handful of typos, but a level of line-editing that a meaningful share of readers found intrusive enough to lead with. The 3.95 Goodreads average against a 4.4 on Amazon is that complaint doing its work on the platform where people write more than they rate.

The other thing to reset before you start is what kind of dark this is. Sold and shelved as vampire romantasy, it reads much closer to captivity-flavoured dark romance with a fantasy setting attached. The content list — sexual violence, dubious consent, emotional and physical abuse — is not decorative. If dark is what drew you, this delivers at a level most books labelled dark do not reach. If dark is what worried you, this is not the book to test your tolerance on; start with something where the power gap is a tension rather than a mechanism.

My honest note: A strong, unusual idea executed at rough craft, carried by the nerve to keep its antagonist genuinely unpleasant. If unpolished sentences pull you out of a story, this will pull you out repeatedly. If you can read past them, the bond-as-problem structure is doing something most fated-mates books never attempt.

Element	In The Princess’s Pet
Central relationship	A half-witch and a vampire princess — soul-matched across the widest rank gap the world allows
Core tropes	Fated mates, vampire and witch, power imbalance, captivity, D/s dynamics, royalty, dubious consent
Setting	A stratified vampire society where blood determines rank and a half-witch has none
Heat level	5/5 — explicit and plentiful, per romance.io’s top band
Series	Soul Match book 1 of 2 — the series is complete; book two, The Queen’s Heart, followed in November 2022
Content notes	Violence and death, BDSM, sexual violence, dubious consent, blood, emotional and physical abuse

How Dark and Spicy Is The Princess’s Pet?

A 5/5. romance.io files it in its top heat band, explicit and plentiful, and the reader reaction matches: the sex is frequent, it is on the page, and it is where the power dynamic actually gets worked out rather than a pause in the story. Nobody who reads this book is going to feel short-changed on heat.

The thing to flag in advance is not the volume but the consent framing. The published content list includes sexual violence and dubious consent, and both are load-bearing rather than incidental — the bond removes the ability to simply walk away, and the book uses that. Readers who want explicit sapphic paranormal without that layer are better served by Contract Bound, which runs the same heat band with hostility instead of coercion, or A Little Sin, which puts D/s dynamics inside an explicitly negotiated relationship.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want fated mates written as a burden rather than a blessing, you read dark romance for the power dynamic and not despite it, you are comfortable with dubious consent on the page, and you care more about a premise that commits than about polished sentences.

You may want to skip it if: grammatical errors and loose punctuation pull you out of a book, you need the love interest to become sympathetic early, coercion in a romance is a hard limit for you, or you want the fantasy world to have rules you could explain to someone else afterwards.

In short: an unusually committed dark premise at rough craft — excellent if the premise is what you are buying, frustrating if the prose is what you notice.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

There is no viral moment attached to this book and there never was. No trade review, no blog coverage we could find, no Reddit thread of any size. What it has instead is four years of steady accumulation — 2,426 Goodreads ratings and roughly 1,800 on Amazon, gathered slowly by a self-published title that stayed in Kindle Unlimited and kept being handed along in sapphic paranormal recommendation threads. That is the discovery mechanism here, and it explains the profile: high engagement, almost no discourse, and a review section where the same two arguments keep happening.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The premise, first and by a distance. The soul-match bond landing on someone who actively resents it is the thing enthusiastic reviews name, and they name it as the reason the book is not interchangeable with the rest of the shelf. Second, the commitment — readers who wanted genuine dark romance report getting it, without the softening that usually arrives once the antagonist has to become a love interest. Third, readability: page-turner is the recurring phrase, and several reviewers describe finishing it in one sitting despite the length being unremarkable. There is also a notable minority position worth flagging, because it contradicts the main complaint head-on: some readers say the prose problems are overstated and that the book is well written. That disagreement is real, not manufactured, and it is the reason the average has held near four stars.

What readers argue about and complain about: Editing, above everything. Grammar and punctuation are the first thing a browsing reader meets in the review section, and the complaint is prominent enough that positive reviewers open by arguing with it rather than by talking about the book. That is the clearest possible signal that it is the dominant objection. Second, the relationship dynamic itself — the princess’s cruelty runs long, and the split is between readers who consider that the point and readers who never came back around to her. Third, and quieter, the world: the rank system is the most-praised piece of the setting and also the least explained, which leaves some readers unable to say afterwards how any of it works. The genuine split is the middle one. This is not a book where the negative reviews are wrong; it is a book where the negative and positive reviewers wanted different things from the same pages and both got what they asked for.

The series question everyone should ask first: Soul Match is two books and it is finished. The Princess’s Pet came out in April 2022 and The Queen’s Heart followed that November, so there is no waiting and no abandoned series risk — the outcome most people worry about with indie romantasy does not apply here. What our sweep could not settle from public sources is how hard book one lands its own ending, and rather than guess we will say plainly: if unresolved endings ruin a book for you, borrow both at once. On Kindle Unlimited that costs you a second borrow slot and nothing else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Princess’s Pet spicy?

A 5/5. romance.io places it in its top heat band, explicit and plentiful, and readers confirm the sex is frequent and on the page. It is also where the power dynamic between the two leads gets negotiated, so it is structural rather than decorative.

How dark is The Princess’s Pet?

Genuinely dark. The published content list includes violence and death, BDSM, sexual violence, dubious consent, blood, and emotional and physical abuse. The soul bond removes the option of simply leaving, and the book uses that. Treat the dark label as accurate rather than atmospheric.

Is The Princess’s Pet a standalone?

No. It is book one of the two-book Soul Match series, and the series is complete — The Queen’s Heart was published in November 2022. If you dislike unresolved endings, plan on reading both.

Is The Princess’s Pet on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. It carried the Kindle Unlimited badge on its Amazon listing when we checked in August 2026. Kindle Unlimited availability changes without notice, so confirm the badge before you borrow.

Is there an audiobook of The Princess’s Pet?

We found no audiobook edition in any format, and it is not stocked on Libro.fm. This is the ebook-only pattern typical of self-published sapphic paranormal from this period.

Why is the Goodreads rating lower than the Amazon rating?

Because the complaint that drives the gap is about writing, and Goodreads is where people write. The 3.95 Goodreads average reflects a recurring objection to grammar and punctuation that the 4.4 Amazon average largely does not capture.

If You Loved The Princess’s Pet, Read These Next

Three land closest, each on a different axis. Contract Bound by Elle Mae runs the same vampire-and-outsider power gap at the same heat band but builds it from mutual hostility rather than coercion, and it is the most-read book in this corner of Kindle Unlimited. A Little Sin by Rawnie Sabor is the corrective if the consent framing here was the problem — same D/s intensity, negotiated on the page. And Captive in the Underworld by Lianyu Tan goes considerably darker with far better prose, which is the trade this book cannot make. For more in the same band, browse our sapphic romantasy on Kindle Unlimited guide or the full run of book reviews.

The Bottom Line

The Princess’s Pet sets out to make fated mates uncomfortable, and it succeeds. The premise is genuinely unusual, the antagonist stays unpleasant long past the point where most books would soften her, and the heat is both high and load-bearing. Against that: the line editing is the loudest complaint in the reviews, the rank system that makes the setting interesting is never really explained, and the coercion at the centre will be a hard limit for a substantial number of readers. Worth borrowing if you want dark romance that means it and can read past rough sentences to get there. Check The Princess’s Pet on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Princess’s Pet ranks as a committed indie dark sapphic paranormal — structurally braver than its shelf-mates, held back by craft, and best approached for the power dynamic rather than the worldbuilding.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ 3.95 average across 2,426 Goodreads ratings
✓ Premise is genuinely unusual for the trope
✓ 4.4 on Amazon across roughly 1,800 ratings
✓ Editing complaint leads the review section

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

✓ Fated mates written as a burden, not a promise
✓ Cruelty sustained well past the usual softening point
✓ Bond gives the lower-status lead real leverage
✓ Coercion means the turn will not land for everyone

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ Half-witch lead carries the whole point of view
✓ Princess stays unpleasant long enough to matter
✓ Rank system gives both women a reason to behave badly
✓ Supporting cast thin outside the household

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5

✓ The dominant complaint in the written reviews
✓ Grammar and punctuation named repeatedly
✓ Defenders open by rebutting it, which is telling
✓ Goodreads sits 0.45 under Amazon on this alone

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

✓ Status humiliation lands because POV never leaves it
✓ Power gap has consequences rather than atmosphere
✓ Readers report finishing in one sitting
✓ Unexplained magic softens the external stakes

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
✓ Sex is where the dynamic gets negotiated
✓ Frequent and on the page throughout
✓ Dubious consent is part of the framing

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

✓ Two-book series, complete since November 2022
✓ No abandoned-series risk
✓ Sequel returns to the same world
✓ Book one’s resolution not settled by public sources

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ 292 pages makes a return trip cheap
✓ Premise rewards a second read of the early cruelty
✓ Kindle Unlimited makes re-borrowing free
✓ No audio edition to offer a second format

Find It On Amazon

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August 16, 2026 0

Providence Girls Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Providence Girls by Morgan Dante book cover

Verdict: A tender, formally ambitious sapphic cosmic horror romance with some of the most striking prose in indie sapphic fiction, undercut by two narrators who sound like the same person.

Best for: Readers who want a slow, literary monster-as-metaphor romance about trauma, disability and being remade, and who can forgive a book that withholds plot for a hundred pages.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.85 Goodreads average, a 12% did-not-finish rate, and one structural complaint that recurs across independent reviewers)

Tropes: Cosmic horror romance, monster girlfriend, epistolary dual timeline, hurt/comfort and caretaking, slow burn, age gap, trauma recovery, body horror, disability representation, found family.

Providence Girls: A Sapphic Horror Romance by Morgan Dante is a self-published standalone — not part of a series, despite how often it gets shelved with one — a piece of sapphic paranormal and fantasy romance built directly out of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Thing on the Doorstep” and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, set in the Massachusetts hill country and on the coast outside East Providence, Rhode Island, in which Lavinia Whateley runs from the townsfolk who mean to sacrifice her and lands in the house of Asenath Waite, a stoic woman with strange scars on her neck who is quietly turning into something from the sea.

It carries a 3.85 average across 852 Goodreads ratings and a 3.81 on StoryGraph across 548 reviews, it won Best Historical Fiction at the 2023 Queer Indie Awards, and the author has said publicly that it passed 10,000 copies sold on Halloween 2024 and has since gone past 12,000 — roughly 62% of her total sales. It also has a 12% did-not-finish rate and a review section that divides almost exactly down the middle of a single craft decision. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Providence Girls About?

Providence Girls is cosmic horror and it is a romance, and it takes both halves of that seriously rather than using one as decoration for the other. It is also historical — early twentieth-century New England, with the insularity, religiosity and small-town cruelty that implies — and it is a retelling, which means it inherits two women Lovecraft wrote as vessels and plot devices and hands them interiority instead. Readers on StoryGraph tag it dark at 82% and emotional at 80%, and 73% call it character-driven over plot.

Lavinia is introduced through what has already been done to her: a body she was never allowed to own, a pregnancy she did not choose, a town that decided she was a sacrifice. Asenath — Azzie — is introduced through what she withholds, which is nearly everything, including the fact that her body is changing in ways she cannot stop. The book runs on a dual structure, one strand a letter written fifteen years after the fact and the other a contemporaneous account, and that structure is both the most interesting thing about the novel and the source of its loudest complaint.

What Makes This Sapphic Cosmic Horror Romance Work

The prose: Named first and most often by the readers who love it. The Lesbrary’s Sritama Sen calls it “exquisitely poetic and beautiful,” and Goodreads reviewers reach repeatedly for words like gorgeous, lyrical and atmospheric.
The monster as metaphor, handled with restraint: Reviewers consistently praise the book for letting Azzie’s transformation carry queerness, trauma and acquired disability at once without flattening into a single tidy symbol.
Body horror written beautifully: Multiple readers note that the grotesque is rendered in language pretty enough that it lands rather than numbing — a specific and unusual technical achievement in dark sapphic fiction.
Caretaking as the romance engine: The love story is built from gardening, films and small acts of tending. 73% of StoryGraph readers mark strong character development and 73% call the characters loveable.
Two middle-aged, damaged, unglamorous leads: Lavinia is explicitly written as middle-aged, and readers name that as a reason the tenderness reads as earned rather than decorative.

Book Synopsis

Lavinia Whateley has spent her life in a hill town that treats her as something owed to it. When the townsfolk decide that Halloween is the night she settles the debt, she runs into the woods with nothing, and very nearly dies there. What finds her is not rescue in any warm sense: a silent, watchful woman carries her out and installs her in a cottage on the coast outside East Providence, and asks her almost nothing.

Asenath Waite — Azzie — keeps her distance the way people do when distance is the only thing that has ever kept them safe. She has scars along the side of her neck that she will not explain, a past she has clearly buried in pieces, and a house arranged for one. Lavinia, who has never been permitted to want anything, discovers she is allowed to sit in a garden, to be fed, to be left alone. The two of them build something out of that arrangement slowly, in the small increments available to women who have both learned that speed is dangerous.

Then Azzie’s body starts to change. The scars are gills. Whatever her father did to her, whatever the Outer Gods have already decided, is not finished with her, and it is accelerating. Fifteen years later, alone in a cottage, Lavinia is writing all of this down and addressing it to a woman who is not there to read it. The question the novel runs on is not whether Azzie will become the thing she is becoming — she will — but what a person is supposed to do with love once the beloved has stopped being human, and why the woman telling the story is telling it alone.

My Review

The concept is the best thing on this shelf and I want to say so plainly. Taking Lavinia Whateley and Asenath Waite — two women Lovecraft wrote as instruments, one a breeding vessel and one a stolen body — and putting them in a room together is a genuinely excellent idea, and Dante executes the emotional logic of it properly. Azzie’s transformation does three jobs at once, standing in for coming out, for trauma that reshapes you permanently, and for acquired disability, and it never collapses into a single neat reading. That is hard, and it is done well.

The prose is the other real accomplishment. Line for line this is the most ambitious writing I have covered from an indie sapphic press this year, and the body horror in particular is rendered in language beautiful enough that the grotesque registers as awe instead of disgust. Readers who love this book name the sentences first, every time. The romance is built out of tending rather than tension — food, gardens, films, the slow permission to occupy space — and for two characters this damaged that is the only version of it that would have been believable.

Where it struggles is not a matter of taste, and I want to be careful about that, because the prose complaint is a matter of taste and this one is not. The book is told in two strands, a retrospective letter and a contemporaneous account, and readers report over and over that they cannot tell the two women apart. This is the single most repeated criticism in the reviews and it comes from readers across the star range, not just the low ones: they describe backtracking to work out who is speaking, and one StoryGraph reader who abandoned it at 39% says flatly that “The two main characters have identical voices.” Because both strands are written in the past tense in the same register, the formal split stops paying for itself. Around that sit the secondary problems: the pace is slow — 50% of StoryGraph readers mark it slow against 7% fast — there is very little plot in the first third, and one Goodreads reviewer calls the opening half “nearly unreadable.” StoryGraph’s 12% did-not-finish rate is high, and length is not the reason; at around 250 pages this is a short book that people put down anyway.

Two expectations to reset. First, it is sold as horror and a good number of readers finish it feeling it was a romance with horror imagery — the dread is atmospheric and interior rather than escalating, and if you came for cosmic horror with teeth you may find it more elegiac than frightening. Second, this is not the emotional register the “spicy romantasy” shelf implies. More than one reader describes it as too bleak and unrelenting in its trauma, and the content list is heavy in a way the cover does not advertise. If “cosmic horror” is what drew you, calibrate downward; if the trauma content is what worried you, take it seriously rather than assuming the romance softens it.

My honest note: A five-star idea and four-star sentences let down by a three-star structural decision that a developmental editor would have caught. If you read for voice and image, this will be one of the best things you pick up all autumn. If you need to know who is talking, the first hundred pages will fight you the whole way.

Element	In Providence Girls
Central relationship	Lavinia Whateley & Asenath “Azzie” Waite — two survivors of separate Lovecraft stories, caretaking slow burn
Core tropes	Cosmic horror romance, monster girlfriend, epistolary dual timeline, hurt/comfort, slow burn, age gap, body horror
Setting	The Massachusetts hill country and the coast outside East Providence, Rhode Island, early twentieth century
Heat level	4/5 — explicit open door, but infrequent
Series	Standalone — complete in one volume, no sequel and none announced
Content notes	Graphic body horror, rape and incest; past sexual abuse and traumatic pregnancy; ableism, including toward people with albinism; death and child death; emetophobia; body dysmorphia; suicidal ideation

How Dark and Spicy Is Providence Girls?

A 4/5. romance.io places it in its “explicit open door” band, one step below the top, and that matches what readers report: the scenes are on the page and they are graphic, but there are only about three of them by one reviewer’s count, and nobody treats the heat as the reason to read this book. It is worth flagging that romance.io’s entry rests on just 14 ratings, and that I Heart SapphFic independently classifies the heat as medium. Both readings point the same direction — explicit but sparse.

The darkness is the part that needs advance warning, and it is not the cosmic kind. StoryGraph’s crowd-sourced warnings list body horror, rape and incest as graphic, with ableism, death and sexual assault as moderate, and the author publishes her own list naming past sexual abuse, a traumatic pregnancy, emetophobia and body dysmorphia. That material is backstory rather than on-page action, but it saturates the book. No reviewer I found flags kink content beyond the transformation itself. If you want comparable heat in a much lighter register, Her Spell That Binds Me and Tryst Six Venom both sit a band higher with none of the trauma load.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read for prose above everything, you want the monster metaphor taken seriously as a statement about disability and queerness, you like a romance built from caretaking rather than conflict, and you are happy in a book where very little happens for a long time.

You may want to skip it if: ornate prose reads as purple to you, you need to know whose head you are in without working for it, you want cosmic horror that actually escalates, or you have limited tolerance for sustained trauma content with no comic relief.

In short: extraordinary sentences and a genuinely moving central idea, wrapped in a structure that loses a real number of readers before it can land.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

There is no viral moment here and there never was one. I found no BookTok footprint for the title, no coverage in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or Booklist, no Lambda recognition, and exactly one sapphic blog review — the Lesbrary’s, by Sritama Sen, who gave it five stars. Jude in the Stars, LezReviewBooks and Bookish Sapphic have nothing on it. Reddit was unreachable from this session, so I cannot report on its footprint there either way. What the book has instead is word of mouth that has quietly outperformed all of that: the author says it crossed 10,000 copies on Halloween 2024 and has since passed 12,000, making it roughly 62% of her career sales, and it was picked up by two subscription boxes, Rainbow Crate and Queers Who Bite, which is how a lot of these readers met it. Then Tantor Media licensed the audiobook, released 11 February 2025, narrated by April Doty and Ellie Gossage across 7 hours 49 minutes — a runtime Libro.fm’s own page still lists as TBA, but which OverDrive and audiobooks.com both give to the minute. That is a self-published cosmic horror romance moving into professional audio distribution off nothing but reader recommendation, and it is why the ratings are still climbing three years after release.

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Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The writing, first and by a distance — “poetic,” “lyrical” and “gorgeous” are the recurring words, and the Lesbrary review lands in the same place. Then the thematic handling: reviewers repeatedly single out the way the transformation holds trauma recovery, bodily autonomy and disability together without becoming a lecture, and several name the disability material specifically as the reason the book stayed with them. The tenderness gets its own praise — the domesticity, the gardening, the sense of two people learning to be safe — and StoryGraph’s 73% strong-character-development and 73% loveable-characters figures back that up. The body horror is admired rather than tolerated. And there is a real minority who praise the epistolary structure as intimate and nostalgic, which is worth naming because it is the exact element the loudest complaint is about.

What readers argue about and complain about: Indistinguishable narrators, above everything. Both timelines are written in the past tense in near-identical registers, so the letter and the diary read the same, and reviewer after reviewer — including several who rated the book three and four stars — describes losing track of who is speaking and having to reread to recover it. One reader who abandoned it at 39% gives that as the whole reason. Second: pace and plot. Half of StoryGraph’s readers mark it slow-paced, and complaints cluster on the first hundred pages having no forward motion and very little exposition; the 12% did-not-finish rate is the number that quantifies it. Third: the prose divides genuinely. The same ornate style that the five-star reviews call beautiful, the two-star reviews call overly flowery and impenetrable, and this is a taste split rather than a craft failure — there is no synthesis available. Fourth: readers wanting more horror and more mythos. Several say the Lovecraft material is set up and then underexplored, that they would classify the book as romance rather than horror, and at least one reader unfamiliar with the source stories found the allusions simply passed them by. Beyond that, more than one reviewer names the bleakness as excessive, and a smaller group finds the ending anticlimactic given how heavily the framing device foreshadows a catastrophe.

The standalone question worth asking first: it is a standalone, it resolves, and it requires nothing else — but do not go in expecting a conventional happily-ever-after. Readers describe the ending as bittersweet and hopeful rather than triumphant, and romance.io tags the book for a nontraditional HEA. That is a deliberate choice, not a failure of nerve, and it is the single most useful thing to know before starting. If you finish it and want more Dante, her second most-rated book, The Saint of Heartbreak, actually sits a little higher at 3.95 across 757 Goodreads ratings, and Sacrament holds 3.94 on a much smaller sample. Her New Age Gothic series opener, A Flame in the Night, is the weakest-rated of her longer works at 3.49 across 502 — useful to know, since it is the one a series-minded reader would reach for first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Providence Girls have a happy ending?

Not a conventional one. Readers describe the ending as bittersweet but hopeful, and romance.io tags the book for a nontraditional HEA. If a guaranteed romance-genre happily-ever-after is a requirement for you, go in with that expectation adjusted.

How spicy is Providence Girls?

A 4/5. romance.io rates it “explicit open door,” one band below the top. The scenes are graphic but sparse — one reviewer counts three — and I Heart SapphFic independently calls the heat medium.

Do you need to have read H.P. Lovecraft first?

No, but it helps. The book reworks characters from “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Thing on the Doorstep” and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and at least one reviewer says the allusions landed flat for them without that background. The emotional story works on its own.

Is it actually horror, or is it a romance?

Both, with the balance tipped toward romance. The body horror is graphic and central, but the dread is atmospheric rather than escalating, and multiple readers say they would shelve it as romance. StoryGraph readers mark it 82% dark and 80% emotional.

How does it handle Lovecraft’s racism?

The book does not address it directly, and neither do the reader reviews — though StoryGraph readers do list racism as a minor content warning. Dante has spoken about it in interview, calling Lovecraft “flawed and deeply bigoted” while arguing that The Shadow Over Innsmouth reads as a coming-out story, and her stated project is returning agency to the women he wrote as objects.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes — Tantor Media, released 11 February 2025, narrated by April Doty and Ellie Gossage, running 7 hours 49 minutes. Dual narration is a sensible fix for the book’s biggest problem, and at least one reader says they finished it in audio after doubting they could have on the page.

Is Providence Girls part of a series?

No. It is a complete standalone with no sequel and none announced. Morgan Dante does write series — New Age Gothic is one — but this is not part of any of them.

If You Loved Providence Girls, Read These Next

Nothing on the site is a close match for this one yet, which is itself a comment on how unusual it is. The nearest we have is Her Spell That Binds Me, which shares the gothic atmosphere and the sense of a closed, hostile world, though it trades the literary prose for pace. If it was the explicit heat you wanted more of rather than the horror, Tryst Six Venom sits a full band higher with none of the trauma load. For the actual read-alikes — literary sapphic body horror and monster romance — we have no reviews up yet, so browse the paranormal and fantasy lesbian romance category, the spicy sapphic romantasy guide, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Providence Girls sets out to give two of Lovecraft’s discarded women a life, and it largely succeeds. The prose is genuinely beautiful, the transformation metaphor carries real weight about trauma and disability, and the caretaking romance is tender in a way that very few horror novels manage. It is also structurally confused, near-plotless for its first third, and unrelenting enough in its trauma content that a meaningful number of readers put it down. Whether that trade works depends entirely on whether you read for sentences or for story — the reader who reads for sentences will find one of the best indie sapphic books of the last three years, and the reader who needs to know who is speaking will spend a hundred pages annoyed. Check Providence Girls on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Providence Girls ranks as a literary indie sapphic cosmic horror romance — formally ambitious and beautifully written, held back by two narrators who sound alike, and best approached for the prose and the monster metaphor rather than for plot or scares.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ 3.85 average across 852 Goodreads ratings
✓ 3.81 on StoryGraph across 548 reviews
✓ Over 12,000 copies sold self-published
✓ 12% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph

Romance ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ Caretaking and domesticity as the engine
✓ Two middle-aged leads, tenderness earned
✓ Monster metaphor deepens rather than decorates
✓ Blurred voices undercut it as a two-hander

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ 73% mark strong character development
✓ 73% character-driven over plot
✓ Lovecraft’s objects given real interiority
✓ Readers cannot tell the two apart

Writing ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

✓ Most-praised element by a distance
✓ Body horror rendered beautifully, not numbingly
✓ The Lesbrary calls it exquisitely poetic
✓ Two timelines in one identical register

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

✓ 82% dark, 80% emotional on StoryGraph
✓ Disability and trauma material lands hard
✓ 69% say character flaws are central
✓ More than one reader finds it unrelenting

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ romance.io band: explicit open door
✓ On-page and graphic when it arrives
✓ Intimacy serves the trauma arc
✓ Roughly three scenes; not the draw

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Complete standalone, nothing left dangling
✓ Bittersweet and hopeful, deliberately so
✓ Framing device pays off thematically
✓ Nontraditional HEA; some call it anticlimactic

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

✓ Around 250 pages, an easy return
✓ Prose rewards a second, slower pass
✓ Dual-narrator audio clarifies the structure
✓ Bleakness rules out comfort rereading

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August 15, 2026 0

Lady Venom Takes a Mistress Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Lady Venom Takes a Mistress by Kat Blackthorne book cover

Verdict: A gothic sapphic monster romance with a genuinely great premise, a magnetic serpent-queen love interest and 5/5 heat, undercut by a 124-page length that leaves most of its plot as an outline.

Best for: Readers who want a femme-dom monster, explicit spice and a man-killing revenge fantasy in one sitting, and who can forgive a romance that goes from captivity to devotion in about a day.

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

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.73 Goodreads average and a 3.59 on StoryGraph, held down by the length almost every reviewer wanted doubled)

Tropes: Captive romance, femme dom, monster romance, gothic haunted manor, Beauty and the Beast retelling, Medusa retelling, age gap, virgin heroine, praise kink, forced proximity.

Lady Venom Takes A Mistress by Kat Blackthorne is a standalone 124-page novella — self-published through the author’s own Dark Hearts Press imprint in September 2023, set in the same universe as her Halloween Boys series but requiring none of it — that runs as a paranormal sapphic romance in a loosely historical setting, where Poesy Laroche escapes a marriage auction into the woods and is claimed as a mistress by the snake-attended monster the villagers call Lady Venom.

It has a 3.73 average across 2,821 Goodreads ratings, a 3.59 across 745 on StoryGraph, and a 4.2 across 1,093 on Amazon — where the book is filed not under Romance but under Erotica. The reviews split harder than 3.73 suggests: 60% of Goodreads ratings sit at four or five stars, and 37% sit at three or below. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Lady Venom Takes a Mistress About?

Lady Venom Takes A Mistress is a gothic monster romance and a captive romance, and the two labels carry most of the book’s DNA. Gothic means the haunted estate, the watching flowers, the whispering ghosts and the maze — the manor is a character, and readers say so constantly. Captive means the central power imbalance is the point rather than an obstacle: Lady Venom takes Poesy, tells her there is no escape, and the erotic charge runs through that arrangement rather than around it. romance.io’s users tag the book fem-dom, non-human heroine, abduction and age gap, which is an accurate map of what is actually on the page.

Poesy is introduced through what she has been denied. She is property at auction, promised to a man who has told her plainly he intends to break her, and her only act of authorship is to run somewhere worse. Lady Venom is introduced through what the world assumes about her — a legend, a scream in the trees, a thing to be feared — and the book’s real business is dismantling that assumption from the inside. It is told in first person, which keeps you sealed inside Poesy’s disorientation and means Lady Venom stays unreadable for exactly as long as the plot needs her to.

What Makes This Gothic Sapphic Monster Romance Work

The premise: A sapphic Medusa crossed with Beauty and the Beast is the element readers name first and most consistently, and even the harshest reviews concede the idea is excellent before dismantling the execution.
Lady Venom herself: The serpent-attended monster is the reason this book has 2,821 ratings. Readers describe her as mysterious, reserved, witty and genuinely frightening, and she carries scenes the plot does not.
The revenge fantasy: Every man in the book is a monster and most of them die badly. This lands as catharsis rather than cheap shock, and it is the single most repeated pleasure in the reviews.
The heat: Rated 5/5 “explicit and plentiful” by romance.io — its top band — and readers treat the spice as the headline rather than the seasoning.
It commits to the gothic: Snakes, ghosts, poisonous gardens, a cursed estate. The atmosphere is doing real work, and the paranormal furniture is not decorative.

Book Synopsis

Poesy Laroche has spent years sabotaging her own prospects, and it has finally stopped working. The auction is a formality dressed as a ceremony: women are bid on, sold, and delivered to husbands who have already explained what will happen to them. Poesy’s winning bidder has been explicit about his intentions. Her mother is satisfied. There is no version of the day that ends with Poesy free, so she does the only thing left and runs into the forest everyone in the village has spent her whole life warning her about.

The woods belong to a story rather than a person. Screams at night, a manor nobody returns from, a lady made of snakes. Poesy would rather be killed by something beautiful than kept by something ordinary, and she walks in with that calculation intact. What she finds is a maze she cannot leave, an estate where the flowers pay attention and the dead have opinions, and a mistress of the house who looks at her and decides she is keeping her.

Lady Venom is not the legend. She is colder and stranger and considerably funnier than the stories allow, and she is bound to the estate by something Poesy is not told about. The bargain between them is one-sided by design — Poesy has no route out, and no particular wish to find one — and the danger in the manor is not the danger the village imagined. There are ghosts here who died for a reason. There is a curse with an author. And the question underneath the whole arrangement is whether the thing keeping Lady Venom in this house is the same thing that will eventually take Poesy out of it.

My Review

The concept is the best thing here and I want to be clear about how good it is, because everything after this is a qualification. A sapphic Medusa who is also the Beast, running a haunted estate staffed by ghosts and snakes, who takes a woman fleeing a marriage auction and finds she has taken something that bites back — that is a premise worth a full novel, and Blackthorne writes the top layer of it with real flair. Lady Venom is genuinely magnetic. She has the best lines, the best entrances, and a menace the book never softens for the sake of the romance.

The gothic texture is the other real pleasure. The manor, the maze, the watching garden, the ghosts who turn protective when the house is threatened — readers single these out repeatedly, and one Goodreads reviewer calls the writing lyrically beautiful in exactly the passages where the setting is doing the work. The other consistent draw is blunter: every man in this book is vile and most of them are killed, usually by the two women together, and the reviews are full of people who found that specifically restorative. As one Goodreads reviewer put it, her favourite genre might be “lesbians falling in love then killing men together.” That is not a joke about the book — it is an accurate description of what it delivers and why people love it.

Where it struggles is length, and this is not my preference against the crowd’s — it is the single most repeated criticism in the reviews, and it comes from the five-star reviewers as often as the one-star ones. The book is 124 pages, and reader after reader says the same thing in different words: this needed to be a novel. One Amazon reviewer puts the shortfall at another 150 to 200 pages. The consequences stack. The romance is instalove by structure rather than by choice — several readers note the leads are in bed inside about a day, and one describes Poesy’s feelings flip-flopping paragraph to paragraph for the whole book. The lore is sketched and then asserted: how Lady Venom became what she is, why the original bargain protected the ghosts, why a vampire from another of the author’s books is here at all. A one-star reviewer’s verdict is harsh and not entirely wrong — the smut is written and the plot is outlined. Line-level craft draws its own cluster of complaints, with multiple readers calling the prose poorly edited, and a specific recurring flag on the dialogue: a StoryGraph reader and two Amazon reviewers independently note the characters switch between period register and thoroughly modern speech, which pulls the historical setting apart. There is a real minority who love the prose and quote it at length, so this one is taste-dependent — but the register problem is named too often to be dismissed.

One expectation to reset, and it is ours as much as anyone’s, since this book sits at number ten in our own spicy sapphic romantasy guide. Amazon does not shelve it as romance. It sits under Erotica, and its category ranks are in LGBTQ+ Horror and Fantasy Erotica. That is the more honest label. This is a 124-page erotica novella with a gothic fantasy setting, not a romantasy in the sense that a reader coming from a 500-page magic-system book means it. If you want worldbuilding with rules and a slow burn, calibrate hard. If what you want is a monster, a manor and an extremely explicit weekend, this is exactly the right size.

My honest note: A novel’s worth of ideas compressed into a novella’s worth of pages, and you can feel the missing 200. If you read for plot and earned romance, the gaps will be all you see. If you read for atmosphere, a great villainess and heat, it delivers everything it actually promises.

Element	In Lady Venom Takes a Mistress
Central relationship	Poesy Laroche & Lady Venom (Alabaster Baudelaire) — runaway bride and serpent-queen monster, captive romance
Core tropes	Captive romance, femme dom, monster romance, gothic haunted manor, age gap, praise kink, virgin heroine
Setting	A cursed manor and maze in the woods beyond a village that auctions its women — period unspecified and inconsistently drawn
Heat level	5/5 — explicit and plentiful
Series	Standalone novella set in The Halloween Boys universe; no prior reading needed, no sequel announced
Content notes	Dubious consent, abuse and rape flagged by romance.io users; attempted rape and sexual harassment flagged by a Goodreads reviewer; graphic on-page killings, captivity, snakes throughout

How Dark and Spicy Is Lady Venom Takes a Mistress?

A full 5/5. romance.io rates the steam level “explicit and plentiful,” its top band — the same rating it gives the most explicit titles in the genre — and reader consensus backs it without qualification. Individual reviewers put the spice at 4/5 and 5/5 in their own breakdowns, and the recurring note is that the sex is the most fully realised writing in the book. It arrives early, it recurs, and it is inventively supernatural about what a serpent-monster can do.

The darkness needs naming separately, because it is real and it is front-loaded. romance.io’s users flag dubious consent, abuse and rape on this title, and a Goodreads reviewer warns specifically for attempted rape and sexual harassment. The premise is captivity, the power imbalance is not resolved before the sex begins, and the violence against the male characters is graphic — at least one reviewer who otherwise loved the book describes a particular scene as genuinely difficult to shake off. That said, the tone is revenge fantasy rather than grimdark, and no reviewer I found reports the cruelty being directed at the leads. For more in this register, browse the paranormal and fantasy reviews.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a monster love interest who stays monstrous, you read for atmosphere over plot mechanics, you want explicit heat from the first act, and a book you can finish in one evening is a feature rather than a compromise.

You may want to skip it if: instalove ruins a romance for you, you need worldbuilding that explains itself, unpolished prose and modern dialogue in a historical setting pull you out, or you were promised romantasy and will feel short-changed by a 124-page erotica novella.

In short: a superb premise and a genuinely great villainess, delivered at a third of the length the story needed.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

There is no viral moment here and no professional coverage of any kind. I found no Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or Booklist review, and none of the sapphic review blogs — The Lesbrary, LezReviewBooks, Bookish Sapphic, Jude in the Stars, I Heart SapphFic — appear to have covered it. Amazon’s “Editorial Reviews” block looks like trade coverage at a glance but is not: all three pull-quotes are from named Goodreads reviewers rather than outlets. What the book does have is genuine, modest, organic BookTok activity from ordinary reader accounts alongside the author’s own, and one Goodreads reviewer blames BookTok outright for the recommendation. Discovery is otherwise doing the quiet indie thing: a low Kindle price, Kindle Unlimited availability, a bestseller-rank foothold in LGBTQ+ Horror and Fantasy Erotica, and an author-produced audiobook narrated by Calamity Jane Lane, self-released in 2023 with sound design that listeners describe as immersive — the runtime is not published on any retail listing I could reach, and there is no Libro.fm edition. Nearly three years on, it is still accumulating ratings: 172 people were reading it and 4,865 had it shelved as want-to-read on the day I checked.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The man-killing, first and loudest — “female rage,” “women’s rights and wrongs” and variations on I like that the men die recur across Goodreads, StoryGraph and Amazon from readers who otherwise disagree about everything. Then Lady Venom as a character, who is admired even in two-star reviews. Then the gothic atmosphere: the ghosts, the snakes, the garden, the manor. The spice is named as a headline feature by almost everyone, including readers who disliked the book. And a real minority praises the prose specifically — quoting lines, calling the imagery lyrical — which is notable, because unpolished writing is one of the loudest complaints. Audio listeners are warm about it too, with one crediting the narrator’s “smooth, husky voice” for the atmosphere.

What readers argue about and complain about: Length, above everything, and unusually it is the same complaint from lovers and detractors. Reviewers at every star level say the book should have been a novel; the phrasing “I wish this had more plot development” turns up in five-star reviews. Second, and downstream of the first: the romance is instalove. Readers note the leads sleep together inside roughly a day, and one describes the emotional arc oscillating paragraph to paragraph rather than building. Third, the lore is asserted rather than explained — how Lady Venom became what she is, why the curse protects the ghosts, why a vampire from another of the author’s books appears at all. Fourth, editing and register: a StoryGraph reviewer calls it “As poorly edited as it is written,” and an Amazon reviewer names the specific mechanism, describing dialogue that switches between Victorian-era and modern English. Fifth, the ending is abrupt; several readers wanted the aftermath the book skips, and the epilogue’s transformation reads to some as a shortcut to the happy ending. The genuine split is on the prose: a substantial minority find it quotable and atmospheric where the majority find it rushed, and one five-star reviewer cheerfully calls the writing atrocious while giving it full marks anyway. Worth noting against all of this: StoryGraph’s did-not-finish rate is only 2%, well under the rates I have been seeing on longer titles this month. People are not bouncing off this book. They finish it, and then they wish there had been more of it.

The standalone question worth asking first: it resolves completely. Poesy and Lady Venom get a happily-ever-after, there is an epilogue, and nothing is required before or after it — the Halloween Boys crossover is flavour, not homework. No sequel has been announced as of August 2026, despite a steady stream of reviews asking for one. If you want more of this author, the honest picture is that this is her lowest-rated widely-read title: Lady Venom sits at 3.73 across 2,821 Goodreads ratings, while her most-read book, Ghost, holds 4.04 across more than 11,000. Among her other sapphic titles, Selah Gothic rates 3.94 across roughly 1,600 ratings and sWitch sits level with this one at 3.73. Go to Ghost for the strongest reception and to Selah Gothic for the nearest sapphic gothic neighbour.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Lady Venom Takes a Mistress end on a cliffhanger?

No. It is a complete standalone with a happily-ever-after and an epilogue. Some readers find the final chapters abrupt and wish for more aftermath, but you are not left hanging and no sequel is required.

How spicy is Lady Venom Takes a Mistress?

A 5/5. romance.io rates it “explicit and plentiful,” its top band. The scenes are graphic, supernaturally inventive and arrive early, and readers across every rating level name the spice as the book’s strongest element.

Do I need to read The Halloween Boys first?

No. It shares a universe and some crossover lore, and one side character comes from those books, but the publisher’s own description confirms no prior reading is needed. Several readers found that crossover character confusing precisely because they had not read the series.

Is it actually romantasy?

Not in the way most readers mean. Amazon files it under Erotica, with category ranks in LGBTQ+ Horror and Fantasy Erotica, and it runs 124 pages. It is a gothic monster erotica novella with fantasy furniture rather than a plotted fantasy romance.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes — narrated by Calamity Jane Lane and self-released by the author in 2023, with sound design that listeners repeatedly describe as immersive. No runtime is published on the retail listings, and there is no Libro.fm edition.

What are the content warnings?

romance.io’s users flag dubious consent, abuse and rape; a Goodreads reviewer adds attempted rape and sexual harassment. Expect captivity, a power imbalance treated as erotic, graphic on-page killings of male characters, and snakes throughout.

If You Loved Lady Venom Takes a Mistress, Read These Next

Readers who want the captive dynamic taken seriously at full length land most often on Captive in the Underworld by Lianyu Tan, which runs the same power imbalance far darker and with none of the softening. If the fairy-tale bones are the draw, Bitterthorn by Kat Dunn is the sapphic Beauty and the Beast with room to actually build the isolation. And for the same 5/5 heat band inside a plotted fantasy novel, Her Spell That Binds Me gives you the explicit sapphic romantasy this book is shelved beside but does not quite belong to. Browse the paranormal and fantasy lesbian romance collection or the full Book Reviews archive for more.

The Bottom Line

Lady Venom Takes A Mistress is a book with a novel’s ambition and a novella’s page count. The premise is excellent, Lady Venom is a genuinely great monster, and the heat delivers exactly the 5/5 it is rated. It is also structurally rushed, built on lore it never explains, and carrying a romance that resolves before it has earned anything. Whether that trade works depends entirely on what you came for — but at 124 pages the cost of finding out is low, and StoryGraph’s 2% did-not-finish rate says almost nobody regrets starting. Check Lady Venom Takes a Mistress on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Lady Venom Takes a Mistress ranks as a high-concept indie gothic erotica novella — atmospheric and genuinely cathartic, hollowed out by its own brevity, and best approached for the monster and the heat rather than the plot.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

✓ 3.73 average across 2,821 Goodreads ratings
✓ 3.59 on StoryGraph, 4.2 on Amazon
✓ Only 2% did-not-finish on StoryGraph
✓ 37% of Goodreads ratings are three or below

Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Femme-dom dynamic genuinely charged
✓ Banter between the leads widely praised
✓ Devotion arc lands for most readers
✓ Instalove named across every rating level

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

✓ Lady Venom admired even in negative reviews
✓ 75% call the characters loveable on StoryGraph
✓ Poesy keeps a spine under captivity
✓ 30% say character development is weak

Writing ★★★☆☆ 3/5

✓ Gothic imagery is the strongest craft element
✓ A real minority quote the prose admiringly
✓ Sex scenes are the most fully written passages
✓ Editing and period-versus-modern dialogue flagged repeatedly

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ Revenge catharsis is the most-named pleasure
✓ The auction opening genuinely stings
✓ 85% of StoryGraph readers mark it dark
✓ Stakes undercut by unexplained lore

Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5

✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
✓ Explicit from the first act onward
✓ Inventively supernatural rather than generic
✓ Dubious consent and abuse flagged by users

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5

✓ Complete standalone, no cliffhanger
✓ HEA delivered with an epilogue
✓ Epilogue twist praised by some readers
✓ Repeatedly described as abrupt and rushed

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5

✓ 124 pages makes a revisit cheap
✓ Immersive audiobook is a strong second pass
✓ Quotable lines readers return to
✓ Thin plot leaves little to rediscover

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August 15, 2026 0

Feast While You Can Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Feast While You Can by Clements and Datta book cover

Verdict: The most convincing butch/femme yearning I’ve read in a trade-published horror novel, undercut by a first half that takes too long to bite and an ending readers repeatedly say loses its nerve.

Best for: Readers who want literary queer horror first and romance second, who left Our Wives Under the Sea wanting something filthier, and who won’t be stopped by graphic animal death.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.89 Goodreads average across 3,975 ratings, marked down for a slow first half and a divisive ending)

Tropes: Forbidden romance, brother’s ex, butch/femme, small-town claustrophobia, possession horror, touch as the only cure, secret relationship, slow-burn yearning, coming home, nontraditional HEA.

Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta is a standalone queer possession-horror novel, 304 pages, published by Grand Central in the US on 29 October 2024 and Simon & Schuster in the UK five days earlier, written by a married Berlin-based duo, and built on a mechanism doing double duty as plot and metaphor — an ancient thing in the caves above the mountain town of Cadenze latches onto Angelina Sicco, and the only force repelling it is the touch of Jagvi, her brother’s ex, which turns a relationship they have every reason to hide into the thing keeping Angelina alive.

The numbers show a well-liked book with a real split underneath. Goodreads has it at 3.89 across 3,975 ratings — 29% five stars, 39% four, only 7% at two or one. StoryGraph runs warmer at 4.04 from 2,719 reviews, 90% choosing “dark” as a mood. romance.io scores it 4.16 and sets the heat at 4/5, “Explicit open door.” It was shortlisted for the 2025 British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, losing to Johanna van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing. The split is not about quality. It’s about which genre you thought you were buying — readers who came for horror mostly got it, and readers who came for romance found the romance is the horror.

What Is Feast While You Can About?

This is folk horror with a romance engine bolted into its centre, and the join is the interesting part. Cadenze is a dead-end valley town between three mountains, tourist-fed in summer and comatose the rest of the year, with Roman ruins, a recent war in its memory, and family lore about the caves. The authors never name the country — Italian names, a nonna, wartime scars, enough that Publishers Weekly called it Italian outright. Most readers take the vagueness as intentional: this is any town that tolerates a lesbian as long as she stays quiet.

The romance is not decorative and not a subplot. Angelina and Jagvi’s relationship is the anti-possession mechanism, so every scene of desire is also a scene of survival, and every reason they have to stay apart — Patrick, the family, the town, a decade of resentment — is a reason for Angelina to be eaten. That is why the sex carries weight that sex in horror novels usually doesn’t.

What Makes This Sapphic Folk Horror Work

The mechanism: Touch as the only cure turns desire into life support, and 22 of 450 Goodreads reviews single out the resulting tension.
The butch/femme writing: 21 reviewers praise the dynamic by name and “butch” appears in 52 of 450 — central texture, not incidental representation.
The body horror: StoryGraph readers flagged gore graphic 34 times, body horror 26, cannibalism 14.
The town: Kirkus calls it “a fresh, queer spin on possession horror”; 88 of 450 reviews name the Siccos, the real antagonist.
The prose: Two authors, one voice — two reviewers in 270 noticed the co-writing, and Muir, Armfield and van der Wouden all blurbed it.

Book Synopsis

Angelina Sicco has never left Cadenze and does not particularly want to. She lives with her friend Gemma and her brother Patrick in a town that knows she is a lesbian and files it under things it does not discuss, taking what she can get from the summer tourists. Her place inside the Sicco clan cost her freedom.

Then Jagvi comes back. She dated Patrick, broke it off, came out, and left, and every return since has been the chaos variable in Angelina’s life. This time the caves stir with her, and something old follows Angelina home, gets inside her, and eats through her memories.

Angelina finds the one thing that holds it off: Jagvi’s hands on her skin. What starts as emergency treatment becomes a secret they keep from Patrick, from the Siccos, and from a town that would not survive knowing. The creature feeds on passion and heartbreak, so the more they want each other, the stronger it grows.

My Review

The mechanism is the best idea here and it holds all the way through. Making a woman’s touch the only barrier between another woman and a thing that wants to wear her body could have been cheap, and instead does real work — every time Angelina reaches for Jagvi she admits what she spent a decade refusing, and the town’s homophobia gains teeth, because hiding is now physically dangerous. The New York Times Book Review called it “queer desire as the cure, not the curse.”

The writing is genuinely good, worth saying plainly because it is not the norm in this corner of the shelf. Clements and Datta build a suffocating small town with real specificity — the Sicco house, the summer crowds, the caves, the way a place can love you and diminish you at once. The co-authorship is invisible: in 270 reviews, two readers noticed there were two writers. The Lesbrary’s Rachel Friars called it “sharp, clever, and well-written.”

Pacing is the problem, and the single most repeated criticism in the reviews. Eighteen reviewers in my 450-review sample name a slow start, a dragging middle or a slog; ten more call it repetitive. That puts readers in direct conflict with the trade press, the most interesting thing in the evidence file: Publishers Weekly says the story “moves at a breakneck clip,” Kirkus says it runs at a rapid pace, and only BookPage noticed that “the extended family drama is a distraction from the forward momentum.” That drama is also the book’s richest material, so it’s a trade-off, not a fixable flaw — but if you need a horror novel scaring you before page 100, it will test you.

The genre gap is real and readers feel it. Seven say outright that it isn’t scary enough or isn’t really horror, and the blog Just Read It Already landed on 3.5/5 with the note that “it felt more like a romance to me.” Meanwhile every piece of institutional recognition sits on the horror side — a British Fantasy Award shortlist, a Library Journal horror review, a Kirkus review filed under literary fiction. Nobody calls this a romance except the romance databases. If you found it in a sapphic romance guide, including this one, adjust.

Then the content warnings, which are not decoration. StoryGraph’s users put animal death at the top with 87 graphic flags — more than double gore and double sexual content — with animal cruelty at 39 behind it. Seventeen reviews raise it unprompted, several from five-star readers who docked half a star.

My honest note: This is a four-star horror novel and a three-star romance, and which one you’re holding depends on what you came for. If the pitch that hooked you was lesbians repelling a demon by sleeping together, the book takes it seriously and owes you no wedding.

Element	In Feast While You Can
Central relationship	Angelina Sicco & Jagvi — small-town femme and her brother’s butch ex
Core tropes	Forbidden romance, brother’s ex, butch/femme, secret relationship, possession, touch as cure
Setting	Cadenze — an unnamed European mountain town with Roman ruins and something in the caves
Heat level	4/5 — explicit open door (romance.io)
Series	Standalone; no sequel announced as of August 2026
Content notes	Graphic animal death and cruelty, gore, body horror, cannibalism, explicit sex, racism, homophobia, lesbophobia, outing

How Dark and Spicy Is Feast While You Can?

Dark, and darker than the romance framing suggests. Ninety percent of StoryGraph readers chose “dark” as a mood and 68% “tense,” and the graphic content-warning list runs animal death, cruelty, gore, blood, body horror, violence and cannibalism before it reaches the sex. The possession scenes are physical and unpleasant in a way that earns the horror label. Racism, homophobia and lesbophobia were flagged graphic by 22, 18 and 15 readers.

On heat, romance.io puts it at 4/5, “Explicit open door,” and that is accurate. The sex is on the page, explicit, and load-bearing rather than ornamental — 60 of the 450 reviews I read mention it, and 32 StoryGraph readers flagged sexual content as graphic. What it isn’t is frequent the way a contemporary romance is. This is a horror novel that stops for sex when the plot needs the two women touching.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read horror first and romance second; you want butch/femme writing that treats the dynamic as a personality rather than a label; you like a small town as antagonist; and you don’t need the supernatural rules explained.

You may want to skip it if: graphic animal death is a hard line — it is the most-flagged warning by a wide margin; you need a horror novel moving by page 50; you want a guaranteed romance-genre HEA; or you want your setting anchored to a named place.

In short: exceptional queer horror with a romance at its structural centre, shelved in the wrong genre.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The discourse here is trade-shaped, not community-shaped, and the absences say as much as the coverage. The book has Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, BookPage, People and the New York Times Book Review, plus a British Fantasy Award shortlist — none of it starred. What it lacks is a sapphic-blog footprint: nothing at I Heart SapphFic, Jude in the Stars, LezReviewBooks or Bookish Sapphic, and no BookTok moment. The Lesbrary is the exception, covering it in November 2024 and again in April 2026. This book travelled the literary-horror pipeline and reached sapphic readers second.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Atmosphere, loudest — 54 of the 450 reviews I read reach for creepy, eerie, unsettling or dread. Then the butch/femme dynamic, praised by name in 21. The yearning gets credit from 22 reviewers, body horror from 24, the Siccos from 88. StoryGraph backs it: 70% call the characters loveable, 94% call the cast diverse, 70% say character flaws are a main focus.

What readers argue about and complain about: Pace, above everything — 18 reviewers name a slow start or dragging middle, and the mechanism is structural, since the family scenes that give the book its richness are the same ones stalling the horror. Second, the genre gap: seven say it isn’t scary enough, because the entity spends most of the novel as a metaphor for suppressed desire rather than a threat with an agenda. Third, the ending — six call it rushed, the last act resolving the possession faster than the buildup deserved. Fourth, the unnamed country, which a handful find evasive.

The standalone question worth asking first: it is a true standalone. Possession and relationship both resolve, there’s an epilogue, no sequel is announced as of August 2026, and nothing requires further reading. On the ending, spoiler-free: romance.io tags it “Nontraditional HEA,” and having read the reviews closely, Angelina and Jagvi end the book together, with multiple readers using “happily ever after” without irony and not one describing a tragedy. What makes it nontraditional is the price — the resolution permanently changes what Angelina is, and the couple stays bound to Cadenze rather than freed from it. One three-star reviewer said the ending “loses its teeth”; another objected to being sold “a nightmare for a happy ending.” Yes, they get each other. No, it is not the ending a romance reader is trained to expect. The authors’ catalogue offers one other option, The View Was Exhausting (Grand Central, 2021), at 3.63 across 8,682 Goodreads ratings — a fake-dating novel with a mixed-gender pairing, so a curiosity rather than a follow-up. In audio, Feast While You Can is narrated by Jaclyn Kelso.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does Feast While You Can have a happy ending?

Yes, with an asterisk. Angelina and Jagvi end the novel together, there is an epilogue, and no reviewer in my sample called the ending tragic — but romance.io tags it a “nontraditional HEA” because the resolution costs Angelina something permanent and binds the couple to Cadenze. Six reviewers found it rushed.

Is Feast While You Can a romance or a horror novel?

Horror, structurally, with the romance as its mechanism. It was shortlisted for the 2025 British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel and reviewed as horror by Kirkus and Library Journal, and seven reviewers complained it was not scary enough.

How explicit is Feast While You Can?

A 4/5 on romance.io’s scale, labelled “Explicit open door.” The sex is fully on the page and structurally necessary, since Jagvi’s touch repels the entity, but it recurs less often than in a contemporary romance at the same band.

Is Feast While You Can part of a series?

No, it’s a standalone. Possession plot and relationship both resolve inside 304 pages, there’s an epilogue, and no sequel is announced as of August 2026. The authors’ only other novel is unrelated.

Is there an audiobook, and is it on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes — narrated by Jaclyn Kelso, 10 hours 14 minutes, released by Grand Central on 29 October 2024. Library Journal praised narration that “skillfully evokes the story’s gothic atmosphere.” It is not in Kindle Unlimited; this is a trade-published title.

If You Loved Feast While You Can, Read These Next

Three readers in my sample reached for Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, and Armfield blurbed this book, so start there if what held you was queer body horror as relationship metaphor. If it was the literary register and the sapphic hunger, Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone sits closest on romance.io’s similar-titles list at 3.98, running the same trick with a vampire instead of a cave. And Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays made the same 2025 British Fantasy Award ballot with a far more genre-savvy take on queer monsters. Closest on this site is Providence Girls, which works the same literary-horror register — a monster girlfriend, body horror as intimacy, and a slow burn that earns its ending. For heat-forward books nearby, browse our spicy sapphic romantasy guide or the full run of book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Feast While You Can is a better novel than its Goodreads average suggests and a worse fit for a romance shelf than its tags suggest. The conceit is elegant, the butch/femme writing is the best I’ve read in a trade-published horror title, and the prose earned blurbs from Tamsyn Muir and Julia Armfield without straining. It is also slow for its first third, thinner on scares than its horror shortlist implies, and capped by an ending six reviewers found rushed. Come for the horror and treat the romance as the load-bearing wall it is, and this is a four-star book; come for a sapphic romance with a spooky coat of paint and you’ll spend 150 pages waiting. Check Feast While You Can on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Feast While You Can ranks as a literary sapphic possession horror with a romance engine — elegantly constructed and genuinely charged, held back by a slow first half and an ending that flinches, and best approached for the yearning and the suffocating town rather than for a romance-genre payoff.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ 3.89 Goodreads average across 3,975 ratings
✓ StoryGraph runs warmer at 4.04 average
✓ Shortlisted, 2025 British Fantasy Award horror
✓ Pacing flagged by 18 independent Goodreads reviewers

Romance ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ 22 reviewers single out the yearning specifically
✓ Butch/femme dynamic praised by 21 reviewers
✓ Touch-as-cure gives every scene of desire stakes
✓ Seven readers say it overwhelms the horror

Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ 70% of StoryGraph readers call them loveable
✓ 94% of readers rate the cast diverse
✓ Sicco family named in 88 of 450 reviews
✓ 28% choose “complicated” on character development

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

✓ Kirkus, PW and NYTBR all praise the craft
✓ Blurbs from Muir, Armfield and van der Wouden
✓ Co-authorship noticed by two of 270 reviewers
✓ Unnamed country frustrates a handful of readers

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ 90% of StoryGraph readers chose “dark”
✓ Race engaged by 50 of 450 reviewers
✓ Family obligation is the real engine
✓ Animal death raised unprompted 17 times

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

✓ romance.io band 4/5: explicit open door
✓ 60 of 450 reviewers mention the sex
✓ Sexual content flagged graphic by 32 readers
✓ Less frequent than a contemporary romance

Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5

✓ Couple ends together, with a closing epilogue
✓ No reviewer in 450 describes a tragedy
✓ A standalone, with nothing left unresolved
✓ Six reviewers call it rushed or flat

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

✓ Atmosphere named by 54 of 450 reviewers
✓ Audiobook runs 10 hours 14 minutes
✓ Library Journal praised Jaclyn Kelso’s narration
✓ Graphic animal death deters a second pass

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August 15, 2026 0