Tag Archives: kensington Publishing

Book Review: The Book of Autumn, by Molly O’Sullivan

I received an ARC copy of Molly O’Sullivan‘s The Book of Autumn from Kensington Publishing.

Try as she might, anthropologist Marcella Gibbons can’t escape the fact that she’s a dimidium, one half of a formidable pair of Magicians, forever tied together to enable the other’s powers. After a tumultuous final year at Seinford and Brown College of Agriculture (and Magic) in rural New Mexico, Cella felt more than a little uneasy about returning to the sun-drenched desert campus ever again. She’d cut ties with her other half—the charming and rugged rancher Max Middlemore—and sworn off Magic, academia, and heartache for good.

Until Max turns up at her door, grinning under his cowboy hat for one last favor. Something is shifting at her alma mater, something bigger than anyone understands. One student is dead. Another is floating midair in the infirmary, growling guttural nonsense and terrifying the staff. Their best, perhaps only, chance to intervene requires Cella and Max to work together. But the origins of the disturbances lie centuries ago. To unravel them, Cella will have to confront the truth about her past—and Max. Because she might be challenging a power she could never rival alone . . .

This review contains a spoiler. I’m super angry about how this book ended, and I want to talk about it. But it’s a spoiler. I’ll try to be as oblique as possible, but you’ve been warned.

First, the positives: The prose here is lovely. The book is atmospheric, and the location is almost a character on its own. It was honestly a joy to read.

Second, a small (maybe irrelevant) critique: There are a couple of timeline snags. Places where Cella knows things that she can’t have been told yet, for example. Now, I read an ARC, so maybe those get fixed, and you can ignore this one.

Third, a few minor personal detractions: I never felt the romance here. By this, I mean I didn’t sense the two falling back in love or that they ever adequately addressed the reason they broke up. Neither seemed to fight for their supposed great love. Also, the plot is pretty slow and sometimes a little disjointed.

Fourth, the giant glaring problem that made me seethe and the spoiler: Cella spends the whole damned book wrestling with the fact that she ran away because she was tired of being in Max’s shadow. Always overlooked because he is a man, and thus she (as a woman) was relegated to tag-along, assistant, or girlfriend, despite being a complete equal (maybe even the driving force) of their work. This was a perfectly understandable complaint, one I feel was never appropriately addressed between them. But then O’Sullivan wrote a climax in which, despite Cella’s best efforts, Max saves the day. Putting Cella (the main character) smack dab IN HIS SHADOW. I’d detract a whole damned star for this.

Other Reviews:

The Book of Autumn by Molly O’Sullivan

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

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.

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