I kept reading so many reviews about this books and after I admittedly wasn’t impressed with the New Species books I had read previously, it’d been a few months, so I thought I could do this.

I was very much mistaken.

To give a brief overview: in this book, we now have Tammy (h), an emphasized-petite woman who thinks of the necessary and unnecessary dangers in life and Valiant (H), a feline New Species who is bad with words and good with bloodshed. Valiant meets Tammy when she, for some reason, is frozen upon accidentally crossing into his territory. Valiant is justified in kidnapping her. Tammy somehow no longer has any self-preservation or common sense as her leave of her kidnapper somehow makes her willingly come back to him, and she is betrayed by lust after all of a few days of knowing him.

I very much couldn’t find too much to praise about this book.

From a writing perspective, I am being  told everything and I’m never given any sort of actual indirect description outside the gratuitous purple prose of every sensual scene and overcompensating with lack of indirect description with underwhelming internal monologue.

The MFC Tammy is set up and overtly stated to think of dangers, yet within the first few pages (in which the introduction scene was not really an introduction scene and felt like we had missed at least one chapter previous) , off the batt, she’s discredited for any of her “thinking of the dangers” because she makes the stupid choice of sitting there in terror when a New Species is threatening her.

I’m not saying people can’t be frozen in terror and we never know in which situation we will fight, flee, or freeze.
But then why would you explicitly state how much this character is aware of all these dangers in the first place? What? To build up she’s paranoid?

Not only that, but consistently, we’re shown the same thing we’re shown with a lot of MFCs. I’m a lady who lives in the US. I’m well aware it is unwise and honestly stupid to travel at night on foot alone. This is why I always have a friend on the phone to ensure my safety, even if it’s just them hearing something happened to me.

So if this MFC is aware of her surroundings, why is she making choices that clearly puts her in danger even when it is written in the story how conscientious she is?

Just… So much of this story made me want to DNF and I had to skip through the sex scenes to actually see if there was actual romantic chemistry or if this was an erotica moonlighting as a romance book.

It felt like an erotica, not a romance book.

The MFC has no reason to protect or be with the MMC outside of her body betraying her. The MMC shows no actual growth and continues to seduce and rage rather than actually realize there is value in communication. I’m not even sure if the MFC was supposed to ever have an actual character arc or if she is a self-insert, the perfect, quirky (bleh) heroine, always framed as the perfect victim in every single kidnapping plot, and so on.

It felt like this book had a premise. And this premise was petite beauty and bloodthirsty beast telling in modern PNR. But the execution of that premise into a product left so much to be desired.

I’ll give it a few more months before trying out another New Species book. Just wasn’t my cup of tea. I don’t think I’ll try to finish this book. Maybe this would make more sense to read in order, but from all I’ve read of this series, even if I tried reading them back to back, it wouldn’t change the lack of literary elements.