Wicked as They Come by Delilah S. Dawson

DNF @ 25%

I just read BLOOM by this author and it was fantastic. When I found out that she was writing books during the aughts-early 2010s paranormal boom, I was THRILLED. And it's a morally grey vampire romance? Say less.

The beginning of this book was really great. I'm actually sad that so many people are hating on the heroine because I thought she was really sympathetic and relatable. A hospice nurse who just went through a bad and abusive divorce, whose nana is dying of cancer? Of course she'd be prickly and hesitant to commit. Like, duh.

Where the book lost me was the way the world building was set up. At first I was digging the portal fantasy/Alice in Wonderland vibes, but steampunk is not my favorite and I just found some of the writing passages too clunky to really get into the story the way I wanted to.

P.S. This book uses the g-word a lot if you don't want to see that. It's not used particularly offensively (imo) and the world it's used in is alternate Victorian, so it makes sense given the context, but I know some people are particularly sensitive about this word's usage.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars

The Manchineel by Jessica Carrasquillo

How weird is it that I've read two books this year where people got murdered with manchineel fruits this year? I had literally never heard of this plant before and now I feel like I'm seeing it EVERYWHERE.

Anyway, THE MANCHINEEL was exactly what I look for in a spicy romantic suspense book: I love books that have this inevitable, claustrophobic feeling of doom hanging suspended over the characters like the sword of Damocles. And Elyse, with her history of trauma and her newfound obsession in the talent agency lawyer who's supposed to help grow her social media presence, is like a match in the powderkeg that is this book. You know there's going to be an explosion and that it's going to be BIG.

I think this book reminded me a lot of WATCH THE GIRLS by Jennifer Wolfe and PRETTY THINGS by Janelle Brown-- not because the plots were similar but because all three books are about beautiful, dangerous women who are willing to do anything to get what they want. While reading, I kept asking myself if Elyse was a sociopath. There's a belief that sociopaths can't feel love but they do-- just in a different way, and usually because they feel an affinity for their love interest that reminds them of themselves. Ben, with his similar background of poverty, abuse, and being "othered" was a kindred spirit to Elyse, just more successful-- as if he were a reflection of what she could have been herself.

Whether or not you like Elyse, or think that she's a sociopath or just incredibly warped and made desperate by trauma, this is a fascinating read with a compellingly toxic romance. I don't normally like cheating romances at all but if I am going to read one, I like it like this-- where everyone is flawed and toxic and desperate and none of the ugliness is swept under the rug. When I wasn't reading this book, I was thinking about it, and the characters. I imagine I'll be thinking about them for a while. Jessica is such a talented author and I can't wait to read more of her work, if this is what I can expect from her.

5 out of 5 stars

The Bone King and the Starling by Elizabeth Stephens

One of my friends has been trying to get me to read Elizabeth Stephens for the longest time and after reading THE BONE KING AND THE STARLING, I clearly need to snap up her backlist because this book was soooo good. It reminded me a lot of a more violent and explicit version of Elizabeth Vaughan's WARPRIZE, with heavy dashes of a non-rapey Khal Drogo, set in an alternate Norse fantasy kingdom where mammoths roam across the ice.

The plot of this book is pretty simple. Starling is a Black thrall living in a viking community. Her mother was taken for her beauty but her father was a douche, and when she was orphaned, she basically became a slave-ward in this viking community lorded over by indolent and corrupt lords who starve their town into poverty by embezzling the lion's share for themselves. I guess they heard about Trump's trickle-down economic plan.

When Calai, the bone king, comes to the village, he is disgusted by the living conditions and the squalor. He also does not support slavery at all. I feel like if you're going to write slavery into a fantasy novel, this is the best way to do it, as it is not romanticized at all, and ends with a violent uprising against the oppressors. As soon as we get a taste of Calai's wrath, I was just sitting there kicking my feet, waiting for him to burn everything down to the ground for his lady AND BOY DID HE.

If you love hot warrior heroes, sweet heroines, and books where they're both virgins(!!!!), this book has all of that, as well as touch her and die, who did this to you?!, and "my wife."

4 out of 5 stars

What Is Dark Within Me by L.B. Black

I grabbed WHAT IS DARK WITHIN ME on impulse because of the author's Threads posts (very good marketing tbh) and I did not regret it at all. At its surface, this is a dark gothic romantasy about a woman who falls in love with the devil, but if you go down several levels, it's also about overcoming religious trauma, accepting your true self, and finding a love that is both brutal and true.

The writing in this was exceptional and felt very episodic, like I was watching a TV show in book form. I also loved the author's take on magic and the hierarchical systems that enforce it. Her writing style reminds me a lot of Freda Warrington, who is one of my favorite speculative writers. This was very slow burn and has a prickly, morally grey FMC and a villainous hero who would burn the world down for his love. There was nothing I didn't enjoy about this and I can't wait to read the next book in the series, plus everything else this author wrote. LOVE.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Swallowed by Meg Smitherman

I loved THRUM by this author, so when I found out she was writing another science-fiction horror romance, I was all over that like white on rice. SWALLOWED has a similar, eerily claustrophobic premise: a team of scientists go to an Earth-like planet to see if its conditions are compatible for human life. But something outside their camp lurks, and Jill, the botanist, can't help but wonder if it's the same thing that was responsible for the death of her mother's team on the first expedition all those years before she was born..

Meg Smitherman has a beautiful, poetic writing style and she does a great job of writing body horror that is genuinely terrifying without being overly graphic (which is a tough line to not cross). I also think her sex scenes are decent, which is always a must with smut. SWALLOWED is spicier than THRUM but I still liked THRUM better because I think it had a better atmosphere and pacing. SWALLOWED was very slow to start and while some of this is to set the stage and establish the characters, it ended up making the book feel a little unevenly paced and-- I'm so sorry-- boring.

The second half of the book nearly made up for the first. Excellent twists, genuine horror, and some fun reveals about the heroine's morally grey nature. I don't think I'd read this again but I'll definitely be recommending it to people looking for botanical horror, and I can't wait to see what she writes next.

3 to 3.5 out of 5 stars

Grave Matter by Karina Halle

This is one of the easiest five-star reviews I've ever written because GRAVE MATTER was a wild rollercoaster ride of equal parts thrills and chills from start to finish and I never wanted to get off. It's set in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. The heroine, Sydney, is a biologist who's been selected for an exclusive and important project working up close with fungi-- specifically a newly discovered glowing species-- at a facility owned by the reclusive Madrona Foundation.

However, as soon as she gets there, something feels off. They take away her technology and her phone, the animals in the woods don't look right and don't move right, and she keeps getting flashes of things that look a whole fucking lot like ghosts. Add to that a brooding love interest who is kinky and forbidden and a backdrop that is both lush and terrifying, and you have a recipe for a luscious dark truffle of a book that is as delicious as it is insidious.

Less is definitely more going into this book, for sure. I am SO glad I didn't read spoilers and went in cold. Halle can be a hit-or-miss author for me but her new books are all so amazing and I think this might be my new favorite of hers. Gothic is definitely a genre she does well. Can't wait to read more from her!

5 out of 5 stars

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli

Even though ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF is not a long book, it took me several months to finish because the subject matter was so heavy. Not that I'm surprised-- this is the same author who wrote SOMEDAY, MAYBE, an ugly and raw portrayal of the isolating and destructive power of grief. I was more than expecting this book to hit well below the emotional belt... which it DOES, by the way.

Anuri is a British-Nigerian woman struggling with alcohol addiction and femdomming her loyal army of simpering paypigs on OF while also running her booming scented candle business. But she's also the stepdaughter of a successful white parenting influencer named Ophelia, who posted every single one of her most humiliating and vulnerable moments online for clicks. When she became a teenager, she'd had enough and began to push back, and then Ophelia and her father had a second daughter, Noelle, who replaced Anuri.

Anuri, watching and stalking her stepmother through screens, is seeing the same destructive patterns happen to her half-sister. And this, and the fact that her past is publicly accessible, drive her to sue Ophelia, to force her to wipe her content off the internet forever and finally bring herself peace. But Ophelia didn't get to where she was by submitting to pressure, and she's willing to fight dirty to stay in the spotlight.

This is honestly such a timely read, because the first wave of parenting influencers' kids are starting to come of age and I think it's pretty clear that their lives were not nearly as rosy as their mothers pretended. Anyone who has complained about the ethics of parent influencing is going to feel vindicated by this book because it explores literally all the horrors: the bullying from peers, the lasting emotional damage, the conflict of interest when a child's best interests prevent loss of income to the home, and, of course, how putting children online also puts them into proximity to predators and other dangerous people. 

Ophelia's whiteness adds another layer of ick to the situation because she uses her Black husband and Black daughters in a way that essentially commodifies their Blackness and their bodies, in an attempt to gain credibility and access to spheres where she really doesn't belong. By the end of the book, it's interesting to examine her as a character when all of the layers have been peeled away, because her corrosive style of influencing basically ate away at everything that really made her her, until all that was left behind were her own unresolved traumas.

ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF is not an easy read but I still liked it a lot. The characters felt like real people and I think that was part of what made it so difficult to read; it was hard to remember that I wasn't actually watching real people screw up their lives. My only qualm with the book is that I think in an effort to portray Anuri as multi-faceted, there was too much time spent on her with her friends in scenes that could feel repetitive, which did bog down the pacing. But for the most part, I think having these connections were integral in showing how Anuri was bolstered by her "village" to finally take a stand against a toxic and narcissistic parenting figure who was allowed to wield far too much power.

I can't wait to see what else this author writes. She seems to be getting better with every book and I love that for her and for me.

4 stars