A review by calliefornia48
Credence by Penelope Douglas

Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
dark medium-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
DNF at 56%. Read the trigger warnings and reviews on this one before picking it up, or better yet, just bypass it altogether. FMC literally gets spit on and has the word "SLUT" written across her forehead by one of the men in this book...sorry fam, after that I put the book away. 

Look, I'm no stranger to taboo romance, age gap, step-whatever, dub-con, etc...but the content in this book was clearly abuse masking as romance. I ended up getting a spoiler on who Tiernan ends up with and some of the content that occurs later in the book and I just could not bring myself to continue reading.

Basically this 17-year-old girl named Tiernan goes to live with her father's step-brother and his 2 asshole sons after her parents kill themselves. Her whole life she was ignored and unwanted by her parents, so she is lacking social skills, and does not know how to process emotions and my guess has un-diagnosed reactive attachment disorder. Ok so she's in the wilderness of Colorado and starts lusting after these 3 men and they decide to be possessive pieces of shit and abuse/threaten to abuse her, but because it's attention, she is like "well at least they aren't ignoring me! I must be in love!”

Books like this make me so mad, because it's an extremely slippery slope masking abuse as romance. We saw it with Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey, and Credence falls in that same category. I hate the idea that someone is going to read this and think "oh this is normal behavior in a healthy relationship, I'm going to keep going with this person." It's very uncomfortable. 

Officially done with Penelope Douglas, Birthday Girl was my first read and once I got over the book hangover, I decided that one had a lot of red flags as well.

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