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silvereyedathena 's review for:
Feathers So Vicious
by Liv Zander
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The Book:
Okay, first of all, I need to say this: people have one jaw. ONE. "My jaws tightened." "His jaws clenched." One. Jaw.
Moving on.
This is a fucking dark book.
There's a ton of rape in this book - and not the CNC of a romance novel, but straight-up brutal depictions of rape as a form of torture and pillage. It's... rough. I can see why people would DNF this, damn my completionist tendencies.
One of our male leads is an outright sadistic brute who repeatedly physically brutalizes our female lead in humiliating, permanent ways. Again, not in an "oh, but she deep down kinda likes it" romance novel way, but in a cruel, deliberately torturous and vengeful way. It's not sexy. It's not "darkly sensual." It's the kinda "kill the cat" moment authors and screenwriters include so the audience knows a villain is irredeemable. Except then, Liv Zander tries to redeem him. And I love a redeemed bad guy as much as the next person, but there's a fucking line.
The other male lead is the protective, gentle one. And yeah, he's pretty hot. But even he (and the rest of the court) seems pretty unbothered by his buddy carving a sigil into an innocent woman's chest and/or publicly humiliating her. True, he eventually starts to come around, but we don't see him really struggle with issues of loyalty and protectiveness until way too late in the book. Generally speaking, we don't get enough chapters from his POV at all, which is a shame because his audio performer is really solid. (The only chapters we get from the Brute's POV are flashbacks.)
I enjoyed the second half much better than the first, because by then we weren't being asked to find the Brute's (as I've decided to call him) sadism sexy. The book instead veers toward where I <i>thought</i> it was going to go all along: an MFM romance with one rough guy and one gentle guy. I <i>thought</i> that's where we were going to end up. But instead, we get the twist of the softer side of the Brute being all a ploy to break our female lead, making her - and us - believe he was softening when the whole thing was another sadistic, cruel joke. And theoretically you could argue the author is a genius for invoking the same feelings of betrayal in me as in our lead character, but in reality it just made me angry with the author. Because I have a strong feeling she's going to try to redeem him "for reals this time, guys, I promise," in book 2. And while I have no problem compartmentalizing romantic fiction tropes from reality, there comes a point when it stops being fun, and you're just reading about a woman who can't escape her abuser.
The final-final reveal on our main character was easy to see coming, but I admit made for a solid "leave them wanting more" ending. I'm annoyed that the whole thing worked, and that I actually want to read the next one. Damn it.
The Audio:
The performers were... fine. I'm learning I prefer duet over dual-style narration, and unfortunately this was (three-person) dual.
There were some weird elements here, though. For some reason the book apparently - and uselessly - starts each chapter by naming the POV character twice, which was baffling. Several words and names were pronounced differently depending on which performer was speaking. A few words were mispronounced entirely - there were even 1-2 outright flubs - and there were some pauses mud-sentence that lasted a beat too long, which was all very distracting. And no one but me would notice, but the Brute's performer had an annoying habit of ending every sentence with the exact same inflection, which started to irk me like a super-repetitive song. Honestly, the other male performer did such a good job differentiating between the two leads on his chapters that they could have not hired the third guy and put that money toward hiring a better editor and/or sound engineer instead.
Okay, first of all, I need to say this: people have one jaw. ONE. "My jaws tightened." "His jaws clenched." One. Jaw.
Moving on.
This is a fucking dark book.
There's a ton of rape in this book - and not the CNC of a romance novel, but straight-up brutal depictions of rape as a form of torture and pillage. It's... rough. I can see why people would DNF this, damn my completionist tendencies.
One of our male leads is an outright sadistic brute who repeatedly physically brutalizes our female lead in humiliating, permanent ways. Again, not in an "oh, but she deep down kinda likes it" romance novel way, but in a cruel, deliberately torturous and vengeful way. It's not sexy. It's not "darkly sensual." It's the kinda "kill the cat" moment authors and screenwriters include so the audience knows a villain is irredeemable. Except then, Liv Zander tries to redeem him. And I love a redeemed bad guy as much as the next person, but there's a fucking line.
The other male lead is the protective, gentle one. And yeah, he's pretty hot. But even he (and the rest of the court) seems pretty unbothered by his buddy carving a sigil into an innocent woman's chest and/or publicly humiliating her. True, he eventually starts to come around, but we don't see him really struggle with issues of loyalty and protectiveness until way too late in the book. Generally speaking, we don't get enough chapters from his POV at all, which is a shame because his audio performer is really solid. (The only chapters we get from the Brute's POV are flashbacks.)
I enjoyed the second half much better than the first, because by then we weren't being asked to find the Brute's (as I've decided to call him) sadism sexy. The book instead veers toward where I <i>thought</i> it was going to go all along: an MFM romance with one rough guy and one gentle guy. I <i>thought</i> that's where we were going to end up. But instead, we get the twist of the softer side of the Brute being all a ploy to break our female lead, making her - and us - believe he was softening when the whole thing was another sadistic, cruel joke. And theoretically you could argue the author is a genius for invoking the same feelings of betrayal in me as in our lead character, but in reality it just made me angry with the author. Because I have a strong feeling she's going to try to redeem him "for reals this time, guys, I promise," in book 2. And while I have no problem compartmentalizing romantic fiction tropes from reality, there comes a point when it stops being fun, and you're just reading about a woman who can't escape her abuser.
The final-final reveal on our main character was easy to see coming, but I admit made for a solid "leave them wanting more" ending. I'm annoyed that the whole thing worked, and that I actually want to read the next one. Damn it.
The Audio:
The performers were... fine. I'm learning I prefer duet over dual-style narration, and unfortunately this was (three-person) dual.
There were some weird elements here, though. For some reason the book apparently - and uselessly - starts each chapter by naming the POV character twice, which was baffling. Several words and names were pronounced differently depending on which performer was speaking. A few words were mispronounced entirely - there were even 1-2 outright flubs - and there were some pauses mud-sentence that lasted a beat too long, which was all very distracting. And no one but me would notice, but the Brute's performer had an annoying habit of ending every sentence with the exact same inflection, which started to irk me like a super-repetitive song. Honestly, the other male performer did such a good job differentiating between the two leads on his chapters that they could have not hired the third guy and put that money toward hiring a better editor and/or sound engineer instead.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Gore, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Violence, Blood, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Child death, Emotional abuse, Torture, Kidnapping, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting
Minor: Addiction, Animal death, Miscarriage, Vomit, Abortion