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I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but really, all I’ve been reading recently are monster romance novels, and I’ve been loving this particular phase of my life.
What opened the floodgates for me was Ice Planet Barbarians, which I read before school started, and now that I’m on break, that’s all I’m reading. And I’m loving my life so far.
If you’ve read some of my previous reviews, you probably already know that I have read all kinds of monster romance novels: fae, mutant gladiators, gargoyles, wolfmen, and more.
I don’t actually know if I’d classify a vampire as a monster. I have read a lot of vampire romances, especially when I was going through a phase in my teen years, but for a while I sort of stopped reading paranormal romance altogether and switched to reading witchy romance novels, which I absolutely loved.
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But even now, I don’t really think of vampires as monsters. They just feel very familiar, whereas monsters are usually so dark and brooding and always giving off that kind of dangerous vibe. Vampires just don’t fit the bill for me.
In this particular book, our male lead is a vampire, and it’s very much a post-apocalyptic romance novel, even though the apocalypse itself isn’t really a big subject in the book – even though I think it should be, and I’ll talk about that a little more below.
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It’s set in a world that has essentially been ravaged by I forget exactly what, but something that destroyed the entire Earth, leaving humans with basically three options: die, work very low-paying jobs, or serve as blood banks for vampires.
Essentially, people can sign up with this big multinational service to live with a vampire for a certain period, and the vampire will basically feed on them.
The drama starts with how vampires, when they first became more mainstream, used to drink anybody’s blood. But then it was discovered that vampires – who also have blood groups – would suffer some blowback if they drank from someone with a different blood type. So this company found a way around it by allowing poor humans to come and test their blood group, then get matched to a vampire who would pay them for the time they spent living together.
Our female lead, Reyna, is very poor. She doesn’t have a job and has been living off her two older brothers, so she decides to sign up so she can improve her life. When she gets there, she learns there’s an entirely new program where she gets to stay with the vampire permanently until both of them decide to end the agreement. So instead of the usual one-month rotating schedule, it’s a more permanent placement. She agrees, and that’s when she meets her male lead.
One thing I really did not expect when I was going into this book was how political it was going to be. The romance is very much at the forefront of the story, but it’s more about how she feels. We don’t really get to see how the feelings between them develop. It always felt like everyone was keeping secrets (and they were), and even though we were in her mind, it felt like she was never really divulging everything that was happening. Her reactions were also a bit over the top if you ask me.
It’s probably because I’ve been reading lots of books with dual POV, but I’m just realizing that I can’t stand single-POV romance novels – at least not in contemporary romance.
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I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a single-POV, first-person narrative historical romance, because I feel like that would be very weird. I prefer third-person limited that rotates among the main characters in historical romance. But for contemporary romance novels, I usually prefer dual-POV, either first-person or third-person limited rotating between the characters.
In this particular book, we only get her POV, and it’s only in the final chapter that we get his POV that showed us how he felt before he met her and everything that went down.
That, to me, took away from the magic of the romance and basically everything about the book, because for a long time it felt like she was just building castles in the air about their relationship. I really did not like the direction the story was going.
You’d have to read it to really understand, but there are certain elements in a book that irritate me, and nothing does that as much as a love triangle. I literally hate love triangles. I don’t want stories that have them, and I haven’t even read a book with a love triangle in a long time. It doesn’t really matter the particulars of how the third person came into the picture – whenever there’s a third person, it just feels icky to me and that’s why I didn’t like the love triangle (more like square) of this book.
And for the first time in a very long time, I actually read the synopsis before starting the book, and I was really looking forward to it. I really, really thought I was going to love it. This is actually the first in a series, and trust me, if I had known it was going to end on a cliffhanger, I wouldn’t have read it.
I honestly don’t remember the last time I committed to an entire series apart from when I was reading Ice Planet Barbarians, which I still haven’t even finished. So having this incomplete story stuck in my head is messing with me, and I really wish I wasn’t in this situation at all.
And for those of us who pay attention, I should mention there are some inconsistencies in this book. I can’t really point out the inconsistencies here because that would mean giving away major spoilers, but there were parts where information contradicted earlier details, and it pulled me out of the story. I even had to go back and check if I misread or misunderstood something, but that wasn’t the case.
Just as I said earlier, this book is very much about falling in love and all that, but I really didn’t like that there wasn’t a major plot for most of the story, even with all the political talk.
Honestly, I should have known this was only the first in a series and wouldn’t wrap up completely. I was so annoyed because things just kept going in circles, and it felt repetitive after a while. I know that’s common in these kinds of stories, but it felt like the characters were acting very oddly, and I understand that sometimes you do things for the plot, but when it’s obvious it’s only for the plot, maybe it shouldn’t be there.
There should be a solid reason why things keep going in circles. Even in books that are part of a series, my advice to authors when I critique a manuscript is that each installment should have its own plotline and its own ending, with a thread that leads into the next book. Here, I feel like the author just rolled everything together, and that’s just not the best approach for me. I personally did not enjoy that element of this particular book.
Still, this book was interesting, and I do want to read what happens in the next one. I don’t know if the instalments have been released, but I’m definitely going to check it out the minute this review goes live.
But anyway, I’m always looking for more monster romance recommendations, so don’t hesitate to drop anything if you, as an author, have a book coming out you’d like to get some eyes on, or if you have a favorite recommendation you think is criminally underrated.
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