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thysparklyreads's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This book had been on my TRL for a long time and I'm glad I finally got around to it. Really enjoyed the world building, the secrets of Patrick's workplace and backstory and all the different types of preternatural characters we met.
This series will probably be my palate cleanser in between heavier books.
This series will probably be my palate cleanser in between heavier books.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Body horror, Gore, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: War and Alcoholism
whatthefridge's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I’m rating this based solely on vibes, and since I don’t have any major complaints, well, may as well.
Haven’t read an action thriller in a long while, and I forgot just how edge-of-your-seat stressful it can get lol. The romance is truly a B-plot to the urban fantasy, but it’s a damn good romance with the rare sex scenes being actually good.
This comes with dense worldbuilding, but it manages to hook me regardless. I like Patrick’s snarkiness, which makes sense since he’s got that resigned Constantine vibe to him. The things that damned him have become his greatest assets, and he’s stuck being the best at something that’s only chipping away at him. So of course his sense of humor is going to be cynical, and it works.
Jono’s role is really to be Patrick’s anchor, in every sense of the word. We don’t get a lot of time in his head, but he’s a chill dude who’s able to maneuver around Patrick’s personality.
If I had any complaints about he story, they're pretty mild:
Haven’t read an action thriller in a long while, and I forgot just how edge-of-your-seat stressful it can get lol. The romance is truly a B-plot to the urban fantasy, but it’s a damn good romance with the rare sex scenes being actually good.
This comes with dense worldbuilding, but it manages to hook me regardless. I like Patrick’s snarkiness, which makes sense since he’s got that resigned Constantine vibe to him. The things that damned him have become his greatest assets, and he’s stuck being the best at something that’s only chipping away at him. So of course his sense of humor is going to be cynical, and it works.
Jono’s role is really to be Patrick’s anchor, in every sense of the word. We don’t get a lot of time in his head, but he’s a chill dude who’s able to maneuver around Patrick’s personality.
If I had any complaints about he story, they're pretty mild:
- The way PoC characters are described feels a bit forced at times, but at least it’s on the clinical side, not lingering or over-emphasizing.
- No way is a “billionaire” slumming it with normies. Marek wouldn’t be allowed to hang out casually with the Poors.
- No way is a “billionaire” slumming it with normies. Marek wouldn’t be allowed to hang out casually with the Poors.
- I was also a little bummed when Hades was associated with Hell, but thankfully it ended up more nuanced than just having Hades be evil.
- As always I gotta side-eye copaganda, but it is what it is. At least it’s not an incompetent military like in Hollywood.
- There’s a tiny plot inconsistency near the end where Jono is told not to break his lease that’s ending in 6 months, but then we get Jono and Patrick moving in together a month later anyway with no mention of that lease.
Overall, while I was reading this book, I told my friends it felt like I was binge watching an entire season on Netflix. Fortunately, there’s more books in the series if I want to keep going. I’m kind of worried where it’ll take the story since the stakes were already very high here. Very easy to jump sharks, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
- As always I gotta side-eye copaganda, but it is what it is. At least it’s not an incompetent military like in Hollywood.
- There’s a tiny plot inconsistency near the end where Jono is told not to break his lease that’s ending in 6 months, but then we get Jono and Patrick moving in together a month later anyway with no mention of that lease.
Overall, while I was reading this book, I told my friends it felt like I was binge watching an entire season on Netflix. Fortunately, there’s more books in the series if I want to keep going. I’m kind of worried where it’ll take the story since the stakes were already very high here. Very easy to jump sharks, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Murder, Sexual content, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, and Torture
Moderate: Alcohol and Gun violence
Minor: Death of parent, Suicidal thoughts, and Child abuse
annagy's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
I'm not sure how to feel about this book.
Let's start with that I liked:
The world: there's gods, greek, norse, you name it, werewolves, vampires, demons, magic, fae (extremely briefly mentioned), dragons (also just in passing), but it somehow works and there are unique takes on some of them which I liked.
Most main characters are around 30yo and up. Love older women in power. Love reading about people closer to my age in general.
And now the things I didn't like so much:
The worldbuilding is very dense, which, you know, I like me some complex and well thought out lore, but what happened here was not exactly that. The infodumps were not only halting the action at the most inopportune moments, but somehow were also giving us only quarter of the information needed to understand what's happening. I think the author was trying to sprinkle the backstory here and there to keep some mystery going(like the full backstory of the main character, which we only found out in the last pages of the book) , but it just made me confused about character motivations and clear reasons why things were happening as they were.
For example, up until the very end I couldn't understand why is our human main character somehow the only person capable of stopping the bad guy while there are literal gods running around. All of these powerful entities and none of them even mentions why is it that they can't do anything themselves even though they clearly have a stake in it?I mean sure, somewhere halfway we find out that MC and big bad are blood related, so I surmised that it's blood magic, but on page that is just an offhand comment at the climax of the final battle.
Speaking of MC being Too Special To Live. His magic is apparently broken. So much so he's kicked out of military, he's tainting other people to the point of suicide and is generally hiding all this in shame and despair. I assume this was meant to paint him as the underdog, trying to save the world despite his limited abilities. But I never got the sense that he struggled in a fight? He's using powerful magic left and right. If he runs low on that, he has his deus ex machina godly dagger. If that also fails, he has gods saving his ass.
Other plot gripes:
- What's up with the one week deadline for the investigation? If the deadline was because of the summer solstice, which is mentioned, that's understandable. But it appeared to me like that was kept separate from the deadline promised by the MC to the civilian cop. When the whole world is falling around your ears I feel like you can just let it go, you know?
- The MC keeps saying that he wants a smoke and never gets one. It's not mentioned that he's trying to quit or anything. He just says he wants one, multiple multiple times, and just.. doesn't. WHAT IS THE POINT OF THAT.
- The love interest is a terribly underdeveloped character in my opinion. There's even a dual POV, he gets a couple of chapters, and yet, I have no deeper sense about what kind of person he is. Because of that I didn't really feel that much chemistry in the romance.
-How did Jono know Patrick's shields were carved into his bones? That didn't sound like something commonly done, how could he have known? Could have been conveniently explained away by his patron god telling him stuff, but we don't even get that. How does he know so much about magic in general, he's not a magic user.
- Where are the civilians? I can't remember a single person of significance that was not a god, creature, magic user or otherwise, police and military excluded. It's said that only a quarter of the population can use magic and yet, not a single one in sight.
- I don't think the main villain said a single word in this book? A lot was said about him, but he didn't really have a presence at all.
Phew, I didn't realize I had so much to say. All in all, I'll give the second book a try, I think it has a potential to be better, with all the base lore already established.
Let's start with that I liked:
The world: there's gods, greek, norse, you name it, werewolves, vampires, demons, magic, fae (extremely briefly mentioned), dragons (also just in passing), but it somehow works and there are unique takes on some of them which I liked.
Most main characters are around 30yo and up. Love older women in power. Love reading about people closer to my age in general.
And now the things I didn't like so much:
The worldbuilding is very dense, which, you know, I like me some complex and well thought out lore, but what happened here was not exactly that. The infodumps were not only halting the action at the most inopportune moments, but somehow were also giving us only quarter of the information needed to understand what's happening. I think the author was trying to sprinkle the backstory here and there to keep some mystery going
For example, up until the very end I couldn't understand why is our human main character somehow the only person capable of stopping the bad guy while there are literal gods running around. All of these powerful entities and none of them even mentions why is it that they can't do anything themselves even though they clearly have a stake in it?
Speaking of MC being Too Special To Live. His magic is apparently broken. So much so he's kicked out of military, he's tainting other people to the point of suicide and is generally hiding all this in shame and despair. I assume this was meant to paint him as the underdog, trying to save the world despite his limited abilities. But I never got the sense that he struggled in a fight? He's using powerful magic left and right. If he runs low on that, he has his deus ex machina godly dagger. If that also fails, he has gods saving his ass.
Other plot gripes:
- What's up with the one week deadline for the investigation? If the deadline was because of the summer solstice, which is mentioned, that's understandable. But it appeared to me like that was kept separate from the deadline promised by the MC to the civilian cop. When the whole world is falling around your ears I feel like you can just let it go, you know?
- The MC keeps saying that he wants a smoke and never gets one. It's not mentioned that he's trying to quit or anything. He just says he wants one, multiple multiple times, and just.. doesn't. WHAT IS THE POINT OF THAT.
- The love interest is a terribly underdeveloped character in my opinion. There's even a dual POV, he gets a couple of chapters, and yet, I have no deeper sense about what kind of person he is. Because of that I didn't really feel that much chemistry in the romance.
-
- Where are the civilians? I can't remember a single person of significance that was not a god, creature, magic user or otherwise, police and military excluded. It's said that only a quarter of the population can use magic and yet, not a single one in sight.
- I don't think the main villain said a single word in this book? A lot was said about him, but he didn't really have a presence at all.
Phew, I didn't realize I had so much to say. All in all, I'll give the second book a try, I think it has a potential to be better, with all the base lore already established.
Content Warnings
Minor: Gore
wardenred's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
“The SOA isn’t the military with a multibillion-dollar budget and the ability to write off your destructive tendencies with a mere warning.”
“That’s a shame. You might want to look into changing your budget.”
This book was actively recommended to me as something that would scratch the itch left by Charlie Adhara's fantastic but sadly finite Big Bad Wolf series. I fully admit it's possible that if I picked it up for some other reason, I would be a bit less strict. Beyond the surface similarities, like being investigative urban fantasy with werewolves and m/m romance, these books really have little in common. The Soulbound 'verse, for once, is a lot more expansive and varied—and I feel like it's both this novel's strength and downfall.
On one hand, I'm extremely impressed by the rich lore the author crafted and by how all those elements—magic users, shifters, demons, gods, vampires, and more—all mattered to the plot. On the other hand, the plot often got seriously bogged down in all the worldbuilding, especially given the way the lore was introduced. There were SO MANY infodumps, OMG. It's unreal. Especially at the beginning—it felt like the story just couldn't start properly, because every page or two everything paused and there were a few paragraphs of densely worded explanations that I could barely process. Because I expected to read an exciting urban fantasy novel, not a guidebook on a made-up world. It was also so awkward and unnatural given the third person limited POV—as if the main character felt the need to suddenly just stop everything and think about a number of things that are supposed to be perfectly familiar to him. It's like if you, hypothetical future reader of this review, paused right this moment to conduct an elaborate inner monologue on what Storygraph and book reviews even are. I bet you don't feel the need to do that, do you?
This heavy-handed delivery made it hard to follow the plot in more than one way. Like, I'm still not sure if it's a plot hole that during their second meeting Marek tells Patrick something like, "You didn't say you were a mage, we thought you were just a cop." Like, come on, Marek cast an anti-eavesdropping spell when they first met? Although he did describe casting it differently than his previous spell, so maybe Marek assumed he was a witch and not a mage? How am I supposed to know that, though? Was that information contained in one of those guidebook-style detours that I glossed over because I wanted to get on with the story parts? It certainly wasn't in the story parts.
As for the romance plot, to be honest I didn't feel any strong chemistry between the leads and I felt like their mutual investment in the relationship grew too quickly. What frustrated me that given these guys' respective backstories and personalities, there was a lot of potential for me to absolutely fall for their romance, but something was constantly off. Probably the balance of the action/mystery storyline and the relationship storyline, for the most part. And again, there was plenty of potential for syncing up those plots to help them move together more smoothly! But it was completely missed in favor of infodumps and some other needless wordy moments.
I'm probably still going to continue with the series, because the setting intrigues me, and there are a lot of characters here who seem interesting. Though unfortunately few of them are anywhere near what I'd call "fully realized," possibly because there are just too many people and other individuals on these pages to give anyone proper screen time and significant chance to establish themselves. But... yeah, this wasn't the reading experience I hoped for, especially when I kept comparing this book with Charlie Adhara's far more thoughtfully crafted works.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Violence, and Gore
cattails's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gore, Murder, Violence, Sexual content, and Gun violence
Moderate: Torture
Minor: Alcoholism, Fire/Fire injury, Kidnapping, Medical content, and Suicidal thoughts
frillyunicorn's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Gun violence, and Murder
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