Hello and welcome! Once again, please enjoy these mini reviews of some of the romance books that I ripped through recently.
The Roommate Risk by Talia Hibbert
This is one of the few books thrown into the mix for these RFRR posts that was really really hyped up for me. I don't know why, but I was seeing reviews for this book everywhere I looked. Unfortunately, nothing that I saw could have prepped me for how...annoying I would find this book. Now, I did enjoy a lot of it. And I rated it 3 stars, so this is not me giving it a straight up negative review, nor am I saying it's bad. But it very much was not for me.
The Good: I do want to start this off by saying that the writing style is artistic, very polished, and demonstrates a lot of talent. Hibbert is clearly good at what she does. From a purely technical view, this book is well written! It seems like Hibbert has a good grasp on how to weave tropes, original ideas, and beautiful sentences together into a coherent and cohesive story. I also enjoyed the side characters quite a lot, the dialogue was always very fun, and I think the descriptive writing was very well done.
The Bad: Jas's self loathing was immediately too much for me. It's a difficult choice to make with such deep trauma with a character, whether to introduce it early and risk overwhelming the readers or bring it in bit by bit and risk readers missing its development altogether. It kind of felt in the territory of dramatic irony after a while, that Jas was so deeply in denial of how much she hated herself and the reader knew from very early on. And unfortunately, this was a big miss for me. I think the choice here strongly detracted from the build up of the romance, because it telegraphed a really messy conflict and climax that I wasn't excited for.
I would say probably the first 50-75% of the book would have gotten a four star rating from me if it weren't for the ending. I thoroughly disliked the last quarter of the book. I felt that the way the relationship fumbled through its third act breakup was exactly that, fumbling. I also really strongly disliked the sobriety subplot. There are definitely times those subplots can work, and it's always best that they're handled with sincerity and gravity, as they were here. But in a book that was already pretty heavy for a romance it felt like adding too much salt to a dish. It was just a bit too much with everything else going on, and what's more it felt like the author wanted to commit but didn't want to commit, you know? Like one moment this felt like a very serious subplot, and then another moment it felt barely cared about by the characters. It didn't work, and reading the author's notes at the end about how she wanted to experiment with darker themes kind of nailed it for me that this was too much exploration of those themes.
Frankly, I found the epilogue to be disappointing in the way a lot of infamous epilogue endings are. It didn't seem in character, it felt a lot like it put the characters in a weird spot, and I didn't feel like it added anything to the story other than to say "don't worry, everybody ended up getting a HEA!" It was...I don't know, it just felt Stepford Wives to me in a way that the cheesy HEAs of romance novels don't usually hit.
Sunny Disposition by Deanna Grey
I am not a huge hockey person, and I am absolutely not involved in the part of TikTok that's obsessed with hockey. [I do, however, follow a big hockey blogger on Tumblr but that's because we went to school together.] But I feel like unless I stuck exclusively to historical romance, it would've happened eventually. Reading a hockey romance. I've gotta say, I'm glad this one was my first because I really enjoyed it and have just downloaded Deanna Grey's sapphic romance novel. I will probably also read the second hockey romance in the Wendell Hawkes series, of which Sunny Disposition is the first.
The Good: This was just, in general, really cute. The two main characters are great together, and I loved that they had multiple different types of relationships to fall back on and help them get to know different facets of one another. The amnesia plotline was really interesting and well written. I have some familiarity with memory loss like Finn's and the way the character describes his experiences leads me to believe that the author did her due diligence to capture the experience sensitively.
One thing that really stood out to me was not just the presence of 3D side characters (rare for a romance novel) but the fact that multiple interpersonal relationships were developed an discussed throughout the book. It definitely made things feel more realistic and well rounded. The opening scenes of the chapter were really intriguing, and though the plotline (understandably) gets sidelined, I found that when it picked back up again I was still just as invested.
The Bad: I can't fault the reasoning behind it because, well, memory loss was involved, but I really wish the subplot regarding the evidence Finn found would have been incorporated a bit more in the middle of the story. It felt like it was too quickly passed off to other characters to handle and not really as important to the story as the opening chapter led me to believe it would be. Honestly, you could probably take out that whole subplot altogether and the book wouldn't need much editing to recover. I also wish the whole thing with Finn being Naomi's mod was a bigger part of the plot--maybe there was more going on with Naomi's gaming, or it related to more of her passions. I don't know, I would have liked to spend more time getting to know that side of Naomi since it's a big part of her life. I was also not a fan of the amount of contrived run ins Naomi and Finn have in the beginning, they just felt kind of superfluous considering how many real connections the two had to meet through.
Collected by the Crow by Delilah Dare
I have no excuses for this one. I saw a spicy line about it on TikTok, downloaded it, and churned through it in a matter of hours. It scratched a smutty itch, and then I went and read another book by that author despite having no intentions to. It happens, I guess.
The Good: Some of the random worldbuilding lore was actually fascinating. A crow-vampire hybrid being that defeated Dracula, who was actually one of many in a long line of tyrannical vampires? Who now lives in the crumbling ruins of that Dracula's castle, filled with reminders of the tyrant's horrific crimes? That is a wild amount of fascinating information to pack into a book that is mostly about solving canine COVID and lots of fucking.
The Bad: It scratched a smutty itch, but otherwise I found a lot about this book lacking. The writing is pretty cheesy, and the main characters are both really good at being cringe right after dropping important plot information, so most of the time I was completely missing the progression of the interesting stuff. I also felt like Cassandra's approach to her non-relationship with Qadaire was callous, and though this was addressed and part of the third act breakup shenanigans it also felt like a weird approach to what ended up being a HEA style romance.
Fallen for the Two-Headed Dragon by Delilah Dare
Yup, this is the other one. Yup, it's exactly the same premise: monster fucking with a smidgen of plot. I read this one in a few hours as well, actually on the same day as Collected by the Crow. I probably spent 6 or 7 hours altogether reading them both? I will say, I did enjoy this one a bit more.
The Good: This book starts off with the insane attempted murder by the heroine's soon to be ex. Dana is obviously in a toxic relationship, and when she doesn't respond to her boyfriend the way he wants he literally shoves her off a cliff. Instead of dying, though, she falls into a dragon's lair which is fine. This is fine. It's all good. Once again, an insane amount of fantasy worldbuilding just kind of gets presented without much fanfare in this book. An entire like separate realm full of dragons and elves and political intrigue and war and assassinations and trials is introduced but only when the dragon love interest feels like it.
Also, he doesn't just have two heads, he has two dicks. I can't say if this should be classified as "good" or not but I felt like it needed to be mentioned.
The Bad: Everything about the boyfriend subplot felt insane, like a fever dream. Obviously she presses charges, and there's a like rushed through trial and very little actual legal work goes into the whole thing. It even looks more and more likely that the judge is going to side with the attempted murderer and then the dragon just straight up shows up to the courthouse and takes Dana away. Another thing I found annoying, though this is a personal gripe I have with many romances these days, is that Dana is an aspiring writer so a fair amount of her internal monologue and motivations are based around that. I really really dislike protagonists who are writers, or big readers, or involved in anything modern day bookish and it's hard for me to get past that.
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