My beloved readers!
Came on here to do some *book 4* prep and realized I never got around to writing my review! So here it goes:
No Greater Oblivion serves as a bridge between the first part of the series and the last. It's meant to be different; shocking, confusing, and maybe even a little upsetting at times. There are moments where you see the characters you fell in love with in NSP and NDT shine through and then there are moments where you hardly recognize them. This is intentional.
When I started this series it was with only one thought in mind: what if instead of redeeming the male lead, I corrupted the female lead instead? Because that's always a common trope in books like this. Morally good FMC falls in love with morally gray MMC and he always, somehow, becomes better for it. He might stay a little unhinged but his shades of gray lighten significantly due to her influence. Sometimes those endings worked but other times, they felt unrealistic to me. After all the emotional turmoil, stress, and extenuating circumstances the often times unprepared FMC has to face, it was mindboggling for me to reach the end of a book or series and see her completely unchanged. Shouldn't what she endured have some kind of affect on her? Don't those kinds of experiences fundamentally change a person?
So I thought to myself: what would it take for a completely normal girl to break? For someone's moral compass to spin so askew it shatters completely? What would happen to them, who would they become, would they even be recognizable? No Greater Oblivion lays the ground work but book 4 will answer those questions completely.
It's easy to get caught up in Dahlia and Alejandro as a unit and who they are when they're together. I love them as people and I love them as a couple but even as the author, by the end of NDT I found myself losing sight of why I'd written these books in the first place. Because make no mistake; Alejandro is our leading man but he is not our protagonist. Dahlia is. And ultimately, this entire series is about her.
In NGO, I played around with a few of my favorite tropes but gender-swapped them. Other woman drama became other man drama (Rian O'Neil, the man you ARE) and the crash-out usually had by male leads when their love interests leave them was had by Dahlia instead (because the girls can drink, party, and fuck around just as much as the guys can!). I also had my own fun poking at some sexist double standards. Dahlia does in this novel what every other male love interest in dark romance has done (their sins often a million times worse) but been forgiven for tenfold. Will the reader forgive her or will she be crucified for it?
In breaking down Dahlia and Alejandro's relationship I was able to conduct a postmortem and evaluate all their progress so far in the series. Are they better off now than they were in the first book? What's changed, what's stayed the same. What needs improvement and what can be laid to rest. Because make no mistake--for however much they love each other, this is not a healthy, balanced relationship between equals. And in acknowledging that I also had to acknowledge that it was my responsibility to fix it. When a house's construction is too poorly built and unsafe to live in, you knock it down and start all over again.
I hope that when reading No Greater Oblivion, you're all breaking down the house. Go brick by brick by brick until not even the foundation is left. Deconstruct it all so that when we dive into book 4 together, we can do our own postmortem . Figure out what went wrong and start over. But this time, with a strong and sturdy foundation.
I know many of you hoped for more or maybe different from this installment. I'm a lover of happy endings and won't lead you astray, I promise! I'll just make everyone work for it <3
-Leonora