😭 So much for books from Galatea. I got hooked by an ad I saw, and since I had nothing better to do, I thought, hey, why not? I downloaded it… and read the whole thing in just under 5 hours.
The story follows a girl named Lori, who lives in a human village where, on every red moon, a virgin is offered to the alphas for protection. She’s a winterborn - which apparently is the fantasy equivalent of murdering someone’s grandma, given how much hate this girl gets. Lori’s convinced she won’t be chosen by the alphas or picked by a man at the next day’s village marriage ceremony.
Well… knock knock. She does get chosen by the alphas and ends up in their personal carriage. Fast forward: Alpha Nikolai and Lori have 🌶️ time, and she begs him to touch her and kiss her because she’s “not good with pain.” He breaks some sacred alpha rule by doing so and so do the other two alphas. When she’s returned to the village, she’s covered in bruises, bite marks, hickeys, you name it. Her dad flips, writes a furious letter demanding compensation, and during the husband-picking ceremony, the three alphas show up and basically claim her as their lover.
The rest of the book is… a ridiculous amount of sex. Like, truly. I had to start skipping scenes because I couldn’t believe how she was still functioning. Mixed in with that is her training her “shadows” (because she’s a winterborn), and battling some ancient dead villain, which explains why winterborns are so hated in the first place.
To be fair, I do think the book had potential, even as someone who doesn’t usually read this genre but it ended up being so mediocre and repetitive that it ruined itself. That said, I still finished it, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as some reviews claim. It really just depends on your tolerance for cringe… and clearly, I’ve reached top-tier status. A round of applause for me, please. 👏