Reviews with content warning for Blood - Darling Girl

I was so excited to read this book even though I put it off for so long. (It was my BOTM pick a year ago). I love fairy tale retellings and I love when they’re dark and gritty too, like a homage to the originals which were meant to be dark and gritty. But this book was mostly disappointing. It took me a while to decide how to rate this, because some of it was actually well-written and I did feel like I was in New York and London.

But there were things I really didn’t like and it wasn’t until reading the other reviews that I could put words to it. I will say that a main complaint of others is not of mine—BUT still check trigger warnings. There is SA in the book but I thought it was going to be more graphic based on the complaints and it wasn’t the main point of the book. The book is more about Peter Pan kidnapping children (which again is kind of a homage to the original).
I think it had potential if we saw more of Peter and how he grew dark—or even got to see what Neverland has become! That would have been much more interesting than just chapter after chapter of Holly worrying and sad with very little action to fix the problem.

Also, someone else said they were annoyed how Holly wanted to sleep with everyone she met, and honestly that was kind of annoying. Though I’m all for sexual freedom, I felt like this took away her agency.

The author also tried to push a romance that didn’t work for me—there was very little burn in it, it was just 0-100. In a sense, my main complaint for everything is that. 0-100, details of worrying but no detail of the action and how they solved the problem. I’m not going to be keeping this book.

Content Warnings

emilyjeanne's review

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.25

DONT WASTE YOUR TIME

Main character is a textbook helicopter parent, and can’t figure out why her kid keeps pushing her away. She’s described as having multiple PhDs, but is somehow so, so stupid. She also kept mentioning she’d do ANYTHING for her kids, but never actually did anything, just threw money at other people to do stuff for her.

I could not root for her as a protaganist because I really just could not stand her character, and all the other characters fell completely flat. They had no personalities, and none of them really progressed the plot at all.

Also, this book has a huge amount of content that should come with content/trigger warnings but doesn’t.

CW: sexual assault, drug use, death of a minor, forced medical testing on minors, suicidal ideation, death of a spouse, kidnapping.

Honestly there’s probably more but this book was so bad I can’t even remember them all, since most of them had nothing to do with the plot anyway.

Content Warnings