A review by multicoloredbookreviews
Charcoal Tears by Jane Washington

4.0

Sooo... color me intrigued.

I can't believe it took nearly 4 years of this book being in my TBR list before I finally picked it up! And it's not like I was unfamiliar with the author. Last summer I picked up the Curse of the Gods series, because one of the co-authors was Jaymin Eve, someone I was already familiar with and whose work I'd really, really enjoyed before. And also a little bit because of the covers, which, yeah, don't judge a book by its cover and all that, but have you seen them? Gorgeous!. And let me just tell you, this series Jane and Jaymin wrote together is a crazy, majestic symphony of action, adventure, hilarity and sexiness.



Which, BWT, you can check out my review for Trickery, the fisrt book of that series.

But, anyways,shameless self-promotion aside, I was so blown away by what Jaymin and Jane had created together, that I was like, Damn, gotta check out Jane Washington's solo work after I'm done with these books!. Of course, I totally, completely, utterly forgot. Flash forward a whole-ass year later, and imagine my surprise when the little sidebar on my GR homepage was like, Hey, wanna check out this book, Charcoal Tears by Jane Washington? It's been on your TBR since 2017, or something.



Word to the wise, though, this book is NOT for instant-reward type people. Everything is shrouded in mystery and secrecy, practically nothing is explained in this first book, and for at least the first third of it you're gonna be totally confused and constantly wondering what the hell is going on.



Exceptionally few answers are given, but the uncertainty of it all is great at driving the plot forward. Also, the presence of a creepy stalker lurking in the shadows, plus Seph's own constant inner turmoil, give this whole story a delicious, dark, oppressive, unsettling feeling that's very engaging.



Character wise, so far I really like the four guys: Cabe, Noah, Miro and Silas. They feel very defined and are distinctive enough in their personalities and sufficiently developed in this first installment to make them interesting. Seraph is a huge enigma still to me at this point, which is both frustrating and fascinating. All of the lore about the bonds and special powers are intrinsically tied to her, so without some answers, getting to fully know her is difficult. Typically, I don't much enjoy being kept in the dark, but in this instance it's proving to be quite worth it. Every little clue dropped is another piece of the puzzle that is this story, and I impatiently wait for every little one of them.



This book is tagged under the romance and new adult categories, which I'm not sure are all that accurate. There's development of close relationships, and a couple kisses, but I'm not sure that qualifies as romance. Also, there's no mention of anything remotely sexual nor is there an cursing, so this book is a little too PG to be categorized as NA, imo. However, I won't lie. I'm seriously hoping some shenanigans of the sexy variety will happen. I like the slow burn, but I'm ready for some romance, dammit!