Reviews tagging 'Alcohol'

A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson

45 reviews

cgn's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I don’t know what to say about this story other than it kept my interest. I don’t usually like dark stories, but this depiction of abusive relationships was extremely well done. Not a story for me, but I still enjoyed reading.

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paperbrownies's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

- lgbtqiap+, adult, fantasy, historical fiction, horror, gothic, vampires
- m|w|w|m
- bi protagonists, sapphic, polyamory

my mind is actually blown to bits right now!!

cw: grooming, emotional, verbal, and physical intimate partner abuse, violence, blood and gore, murder, gaslighting, war, famine, and plague, consensual sexual content, sadomasochism, self harm, body horror, violence and murder, alcohol use, depression and mania and  brief references to sexual assault (not directed at any named character), drug use, drowning
(cw's copied from author's website)

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disasterwarlock's review against another edition

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dark tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0


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wardenred's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Love is violence, my darling, it is a thunderstorm that tears apart your world. More often than not, love ends in tragedy, but we go on loving in the hopes that this time, it will be different.

This book is, simply put, beautiful. A gothic novel at its finest, with all my favorite vampire tropes gathered under a single cover, dark in a way that has nothing to do with bloodsucking monsters, and leading up to a glimpse of dark, bloody hope at the end. 

My love for the vampire genre was largely shaped by my teenage exposure to Vampire: the Masquerade, and I guess I keep seeking out the same things in various types of vampire-related media: beautiful and dangerous creatures of the night used as a metaphor for mundane terrors—abuse, gaslighting, controlling behavior. Stories like that is my safe way to interact with this topic, I suppose. When it gets too close to home, I can distance myself from it. I can tell myself, "I'm just reading a horror novel. Look, there are monsters on the page." But it's still a far more realistic type of monstrosity that I read about in these cases—in this particular case—and I still get to confront it and try to make sense of my own experiences through it.

This book is perfect at what it does, and at how it is constructed. The prose flows, the pacing hits all the write notes, and the characters come alive on the page. I can't help thinking that the one good thing that came from Dracula, for all his terribleness, was bringing the other members of this policule together. 

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charlieeee's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75


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