A review by sjon
Shallow River by H.D. Carlton

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This book was soooo fucking hard to get into bc I just wanted to strangle river every single scene for letting Ryan do what he was doing. By 60% things picked up quick, it was predictable but the story was good. There’s nothing I hate more than a useless damsel in distress heroine and river was definitely not that. I liked that mako was gentle but also threw her around the way she wanted to be thrown around. For a dark romance, there was really only two explicit spicy scenes (plus a random girl on girl one which seemed so unnecessary?) so that was low key disappointing. A tough read and definitely sensitive topics and it was definitely unbelievable that she bounced back as if she hadn’t been abused and graped her literally entire life so the ending felt a tad rushed but the epilogue cleared up all the loose ends and all in all I liked it quite a bit. 
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