I have never read a book with a very large, conventionally attractive man with a sexy, smoldering look on the front cover. Let that be the main summary of this review.
Said fact may also cause my review to be the tiniest bit biased, since my genre preference usually doesn’t extend to this type of book (smutty romance? billionaires? age gap? take your pick. they’re all true).
This book is decent. Not amazing, I need you to read this, or absolutely horrible, I wanted to throw this out my window after reading 10 pages. However, it’s also a prequel, so I’ll be a little more lenient on detailed plot description. BUT I’ve also read some pretty amazing prequels (*cough* The Assassins’ Blade), and this one was just…meh.
The beginning concept was good. Typically, I don’t go the one night stand route, but I’m also an addict for pining fictional men (probably because I don’t receive the same affection in real life), so seeing Atticus become obsessed with Ophelia was the highlight of this prequel. Unfortunately, it happened to be the only one.
I enjoyed the first 20% of this book, before the pining turned towards agressive sex remarks, “I need your body,” and an inability to keep hands off of each other. We get it, you’re in lust (or are you?). I’ll admit, I love the obsession, but can I also get a bit of plot with it?
As for the characters, Atticus is your typical strong, manly man, (I would say alpha, but we’re not in that universe), don’t f with me, big you know what, while Ophelia is the complete opposite: small and feminine, but SO different because she has shorter hair and NO curves (OMG WHAT? HOW COULD SHE?).
(This is not me excluding her trauma throughout this entire series. I fully feel sympathy and understand her abusive past; I just feel like she deserves more character development than her traumatic home life.)
Atticus, on the other hand, got handed a free pass for being an asshole simply because “that’s his nature,” as did the rest of his family. They’re all overly controlling. The only character I liked was the sibling that was hated. (Typical)
All in all, I feel like the concept was good, but the execution was poor.
Thank you Forward PR for a free copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.