Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

The Ritual by Shantel Tessier

3 reviews

midnightrose_reads's review

dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The Ritual is the first book in The Lords series and is a dark romantic suspense about a secret society, that resembles an assassin guild. Ryat and Blakely attend Barrington University, a college for the super wealthy. Ryat has been in The Lords secret society since freshman year, and in his senior year, he is ordered to take Blakely as his ‘Chosen’.  Blakely, agrees to the arrangement in order to get back at her very controlling boyfriend Matt. Little does she know how much her life will change….

This is a pretty solid start to this series, with plenty of scorching hot spicy scenes, and tense nail-biting moments. It’s not a five star, for me, however. I feel as though because this book is clearly half romantic suspense the page count should have been tightened up considerably. I feel as if the suspenseful parts would have popped even more if it didn’t feel like in parts it was starting to drag. I don’t mind a long romance book, but for books that contain romantic suspense elements the page count needs to be much shorter than 600+ pages to really be effective in those parts.

(Just as an aside: I hope the word ‘whimpers’ is decreased in the next installments of this series. Its constant mentions in this story drove me nuts! LOL.)

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Toxic relationship, Alcohol, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Medical trauma, Murder, Blood, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Vomit, Rape, Torture, Violence, Cursing, Death, Gaslighting, Kidnapping, Drug use, and Fire/Fire injury

poupimali's review

dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This is a solid dark smut romance.
Really.
It is rough, spicy, kinky, with lot of plots.

Even if the pregnancy trope is an hard pass trope for me, this book obsesses me. 
This is a really strange reading experience.

I loath the trope pregnancy and it ruined my reading each time. Writting a really good dark kinky college romance doesn’t feet with twentyish young adult craving for a pregnancy. 

The second issue for me was for half of the book, the naivety of the FMC was too much. I was this closed to think that she was stupid… And out of nowhere she was able to stand up for herself.
It was about damn time, because she had everything in her hand to put their heads in their own asses.
And even after that, I still think the characters could have been so much more…

The pregnancy trope related to this naive character kills it for me.

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Murder, Death, Fire/Fire injury, Rape, and Blood

zc2's review

dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Definitely a rollercoaster I wasn’t expecting…..read it 👀 

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Body shaming, Child death, Confinement, Cursing, Drug abuse, Drug use, Dysphoria, Gaslighting, Genocide, Gore, Grief, Abandonment, Blood, Classism, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Medical content, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Murder, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Stalking, Torture, Toxic relationship, Violence, Alcohol, Emotional abuse, Fire/Fire injury, Forced institutionalization, Gun violence, Vomit, and War