Tag Archives: fairy tale retelling

Vicious Lost Boys Series

Book Review: Vicious Lost Boys (1-4), by Nikki St. Crowe

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I picked up a copy of Nikki St. Crowe’s The Dark One to start the Vicious Lost Boys series I’ve heard so much about. Only to get it home and realize that I must not have been paying enough attention because I bought book 2, The Dark One, instead of book 1. So, I purchased e-copies of The Never King and Their Vicious Darling, and later borrowed The Fae Princes from the library (though there was a several-week wait for it).

Vicious Lost Boys Series

The stories were all wrong — Hook was never the villain.

For two centuries, all of the Darling women have disappeared on their 18th birthday. Sometimes they’re gone for only a day, some for a week or a month. But they always return broken.

Now, on the afternoon of my 18th birthday, my mother is running around the house making sure all the windows are barred and the doors locked.

But it’s pointless.

Because when night falls, he comes for me. And this time, the Never King and the Lost Boys aren’t willing to let me go.

Reviews:

The Never King

You know, I didn’t hate it. 100% it is problematic as hell. And I’ll fully admit that the particular kinks (and the sex, honestly) are not the sort I particularly go for in my erotica. However, I acknowledge that St. Crowe made it more than apparent that they are the ones that Winnie enjoys, and I respect Winnie for going for it. I liked that, even in a kidnapping situation, she creates agency for herself. She’s practical. She makes a plan and executes it. I’ll read the next one.

The Dark One

I’m still enjoying this series. Though I am admittedly just kind of tolerating the sex, as it’s not a set of kinks that I particularly click with. But the way St. Crowe lets Winnie use it, both for her own pleasure and in the Machiavellian sense, is appreciable. I like watching her take the initiative and the Lost Boys bend to her whims while their perspectives shift. The plot (past the erotic element) is fairly predictable, and (as is often the case with such books) I’m not thrilled that the FMC is made to seem special, in part, by being treated well while every other woman is seen and treated as worthless. But all in all, to my great surprise, I’m continuing the series.

Their Vicious Darling

I’m still generally enjoying this series, though I think some of the lustre has worn off. I’m basically skimming the sex scenes by this point because they aren’t what is keeping me reading, and I’ve started to find them redundant. (Yes, I realize this is an erotic series, but still.) What is keeping me reading is the familial love. This series has such a good representation of it, both blood-related family and found family, and I’m really appreciating how characters go to bat for their family. I’ll finish the series out. But I’m in the queue to get the last book from the library. Which tells you I want to read it, but not so badly that I need it right now.

The Fae Princes

I’m happy to have finished the series. I really appreciate the growth that happened here in the found family, with the men even being willing to express love for one another. I still found the sex kind of meh, though there’s less here than in previous books. And oddly, the whole thing felt a little rushed to me despite being 250+ pages long. But all in all, I finished pretty happy.

Other Reviews:

Nightmode Reading: Vicious Lost Boys

 

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Book Review: One Cursed Rose & One Dark Kiss, by Rebecca Zanetti

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I purchased a copy of Rebecca Zanetti‘s One Cursed Rose (book 1) after I won a copy of One Dark Kiss (book 2). They do have pretty covers.

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One Cursed Rose: 

They christened me Alana—and while the name means beauty, beneath that surface is a depth I allow very few to see. I’m sole heir to Aquarius Social, a media giant about to succumb to an unseen enemy. My father’s solution is to marry me off to the son of a competing family. My reaction? Not a chance. Now I have just a week before the wedding to change my fate.

Who knew the unforeseen twist would be an assassination attempt on me and an unwanted rescue by Thorn Beathach, the head of the rival social media empire driving Aquarius under? The richest, most ruthless of them all, the Beast protects his realm with an iron rule: no one sees his face. When he shows himself to me, I know he’ll never let me go.

Thorn may think he can lock me in his enchanted castle forever, but I’m not the docile Beauty he expects. If the Beast wants to tie me up, I’m going to take pleasure from every minute of it …and we’ll just see who ends up shackled.

MY REVIEW:

I don’t think Zanetti is the author for me. Which is a shame; I’ve one more of her books that I’ve committed to reading (if only to myself). When I picked this up, I didn’t realize I had read a book by Zanetti about five years ago. I just went back and read that review. It says:

Honestly, I thought this was pretty bad. The plot has too many holes in it. The heroine is spineless, and the hero is a neanderthal jerk. (I can handle an alpha a-hole hero in a paranormal romance, where being a werewolf or vampire or sea monster explains away the assholeness. But in a plain old human, he just feels abusive.) The sex wasn’t sexy, being of the no foreplay, “he pounded/hammered/slammed into her” sort. The science was handwavey. And the whole thing just felt ridiculous. But hey, I do an alphabet challenge every year, and I always struggle to find a Z-author. Now I have.

With the exception that this theoretically has magic in it and the FMC isn’t spineless, this review of Scorpius Rising could also apply to One Cursed Rose. I recently saw someone else say morally grey male characters in this sort of book are supposed to do bad things for her, not bad things to her. I’m not sure that holds true all the time (dark romance can be very dark at times), but I think it would be the case for this book. This isn’t a particularly dark romance, but there’s nothing about the FMC and MMC’s interactions that leads the reader to believe love should develop between them. He’s a “a neanderthal jerk” who “pounded/hammered/slammed into her” and did little else beyond spout obsessive “You’re mine” BS. However, his obsession begins before the book and is never fully explained. So, it too feels unsupported and unbelievable.

This is a problem because the entire plot of the book hinges on his obsession with her. It’s why he’s so protective, possessive, and lusty. He spends the entire book giving her rules and punishing her if she breaks them (some feeling very abusive, even if—maybe especially since—it’s in sex-play), telling her what to do and expecting obedience, and making demands on her agency that amount to literal ownership. All wrapped up in ‘romance.’ Lately, I’ve been dancing with the idea of calling this “fundamentalist fiction.” Because it 100% lines up with Christian fundamentalism’s idea of male headship and female submission to their male partner. If the stories we read are meant to support and undergird society’s cultural norms, this one absolutely aligns with a Christian fundamentalist world-view. He has absolute power and control, including the right to hurt her and have her thank him for it.

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One Dark Kiss:

ALEXEI
I’ve spent the last seven years in the hell of a maximum-security prison, every moment consumed by the need for revenge—revenge against the bastards who framed me, and revenge against the family who stole everything I owned. Now that I’m finally free, nothing will stand in my way. Not even her—my hot as sin new lawyer. Maybe she’s another weapon sent by my enemies to break me, or maybe she’s the key to my freedom. Either way, once she’s mine, I’m never letting her go.

ROSALIE
When I took this case, I thought I had it under control. But Alexei is no typical convicted killer—he’s a dangerously seductive force of nature. Perhaps it’s the lingering power from his days as heir to a global social media empire. Innocent or not, he’s dangerous in the worst and best ways.

I secure Alexei’s release as we prepare for a new trial, but he wastes no time turning against his traitorous relatives and plotting his return to power. Amidst the chaos, our explosive chemistry ignites, putting us—and everyone I care about—in the crosshairs of ruthless enemies. If we can’t stop them, Alexei plans to burn the whole world down. And if anything, he’s a man of his word…

MY REVIEW:

I said in the review of book one that I’d recently heard someone say “morally grey male characters in this sort of book are supposed to do bad things for her, not bad things to her. I’m not sure that holds true all the time (dark romance can be very dark at times), but I think it would be the case for this book.” I hadn’t yet figured out how to articulate why the morally grey characters felt so off in Zanetti’s books. I have now.

In a completely unrelated event, I saw a TikTok a few days back that discussed dark fiction on a spectrum from light to pitch black. While where the line is drawn is up for debate, for the sake of my point, I’ll use their scale. They broke it down like this: Diet (or light) Dark Romane is when a book has dark themes, but the characters are not bad people. Standard Dark Romance is about good people who do morally grey things that can be justified (like killing bad people), but they love each other fiercely. Pitch Black Romance is where all morals are gone, one of them (and it’s usually the male) does bad things and is a bad person, but is obsessed with their romantic partner.

Zanetti writes standard dark romance that leans toward diet even, and then tries to put a pitch black male romantic lead in it. The reader is told again and again how dark and moralless he is, but then every one we see him kill happens to be pimping kids or beating women or a rapist. They lead various organized crime families (the social media empires are just a euphemism for the Mob and Bratva) but refuse to traffic women or kids, institute moral limits within their organizations, and are basically Standard Dark Romance men. He’s not really a pitch-black MMC, even though Zanetti tries to convince us he is.

The problems come in when he interacts with the FMC because he acts in a Dark Romance way with her. Without the architecture of pitch black romance in the rest of the book, the domineering way he acts with her feels out of place and flatly abusive, like his abusive persona only comes out at home. Hell, the MMC straight-up SAs the FMC in this book, and there is nothing in the rest of the book to give it the patina of consensual non-consent. She’s unconscious when he starts, and then when she wakes, she tells him no repeatedly. After the fact, she states he forced it on her. It’s SA, and the book lacks the pitch blackness to contextualize it as anything else or successfully convince the reader that it’s really what the FMC wanted. So, the male leads in both books in this series, but especially in this one, simply feel extremely domestically controlling and abusive, and there is nothing sexy about it. Some extremely dark romances, especially those leaning toward horror, pull it off. Zanetti’s books do not. They don’t even come close. You simply can’t have a male romantic lead that is abusive toward her, but working with a moral compass with everything else, and not have it feel like your standard contemporary domestic abuser. Throw in all the stuff about ownership and possession, and you have your misogynist, too.

Plus, on a separate point, when you really break the books down. Books one and two are basically the exact same book. So, even when reading the two back to back, you feel the formulaic nature. I can’t imagine I’ll read another Zanetti book.

Other Reviews:

Ebook Obsessed: Grimm Bargains

Fiction Addictions: One Dark Kiss

 

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Book Review: Beauty & the Necromancer, by Kate Seger

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Kate Seger‘s Beauty and the Necromancer kept passing my TikTok feed. I suppose I was influenced because I decided to get a copy and give it a read. To my great surprise, I discovered that I already owned the series. I think I must have picked it up in a freebie event at some point. I love it when this happens!

beauty and the necromancer cover

When Beauty steals into the cursed lands of Eldritch Manor to save her starving family, she finds herself ensnared by its master— Darius, the dreaded Necromancer. Amidst a crumbling gothic manor where the dead dance and lost souls wail, an unlikely and dangerous passion ignites between captive and captor.

Beauty sees humanity buried beneath Darius’s monstrous exterior, while Darius, enthralled by her defiant spirit, remembers the man he once was. Together, they seek to break Darius’s curse. But vengeful forces in Beauty’s village soon threaten to tear the lovers apart.

my review

Sadly, this was a flop for me. So much so that even though I have book two, I’m not going to bother reading it. I feel like I’ve done my due diligence by at least finishing this one. I have two primary complaints…well, three, but the third is a personal preference kind of thing.

The first is the writing. It’s readable, I don’t mean to say it isn’t. But it’s the purplest purple prose that ever purple prosed. For me to complain about this is a sign of how purple it is, because I’m generally pretty tolerant of purple prose. Seger’s writing surpassed even my generous allowance for flowery speech.

Second, I’m unsure where the line between copying and retelling lies. However, this definitely falls much more closely to a carbon copy of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast than any retelling that uses the fairytale as its source material. Sure, Seger changed the names (And we won’t even touch how blunt changing Belle’s name to Beauty is in this scenario or that her mother’s name is Marybelle). The beast is a shadowy necromancer, rather than furry, but the plot points align precisely. So exactly, in fact, that by the end, I was literally calling them. “It’s time to go to the garden now.” “It’s time for Gaston (Harrow) to show back up.” “It’s time for the angry Beast to make an appearance.” Honestly, while I don’t think this is actually the case, I almost beauty and the necromancer photofeel like this reads as if Seger gave ChatGPT a “Write me a Beauty and the Beast story” prompt and this is the result*.

Third, and on the personal preference front, this is far too sappy and sweet toward the end. This is an issue for me, both because it happens far too quickly and there isn’t enough substance to support it, and because it’s not believable (or for me, pleasant to read).

*After I wrote this review, I googled “Does author Kate Seger use AI to write?” This is what came up. So, maybe I wasn’t so off the mark, after all. Here, the author claims to use AI to revise already-written scenes that she believes could be improved. I felt, in reading this book, that AI outlined or structured it, plotted it out. The book feels AI-generated to me. But I’m not dropping any sort of allegation. I’m a university student, and I know far too many people writing essays that AI-detectors are calling AI-generated because they know how to use an em dash, etc. (Hell, I use Grammarly, and I swear sometimes it wants to rewrite my sentences so extremely that it could probably be considered AI.)  I’m just saying the book/plot feels the same as many AI-generated pieces of writing do.

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