Reviews - Caught Up: Into Darkness, Book 2

8.56k reviews for:

Caught Up: Into Darkness, Book 2

Navessa Allen

3.86 AVERAGE

art3mis2000's review against another edition

3.5

dark emotional funny fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

carolynreadz's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous dark mysterious

akilles's review against another edition

2.25

I finished this book a month ago and I was stalling on writing a review because I wanted to figure out how to describe my reading experience in a more eloquent manner.

It’s just not good! And that’s okay.

Not that good especially when compared to Lights Out, which is saying something because Caught Up has more structure. Whenever I was close to DNF’ing, Josh and Aly would show up to save my attention span. The ending left me feeling good only because we were promised a Tyler-centric book. Prior to picking up the book, I actually thought it was going to be a prequel book about Nico’s parents. It feels like I care about everyone else except Nico and Lauren.

I feel silly for wanting more nuance from the writing in a smut book, and I normally have no issues with suspending my belief, but god were the politics abysmally written. I know that there are other reviews saying that this book was too “woke” but I say it was not woke enough. I do believe Navessa Allen had good intentions with how she wanted to portray sex work, especially because the acknowledgments state that she had spoken to actual sex workers for research, but I don’t think she did enough. I think the politics around sex work shown in the book was very one-note, and a more multi-layered approach would have enriched the experience.

The one positive is that this actually felt like a dark romance compared to Lights Out (which was pretty vanilla) but it was just hard to get into because of the lack of chemistry.