A review by multicoloredbookreviews
Dirty Crazy Bad: Book One by Siobhan Davis

2.0

Rating 2.5⭐

I did a promo post for Dirty Crazy Bad a little while back on my blog (you can check it out by clicking on the banner above).

Still, I kinda went in blindly into this book, not fully knowing what to expect, with no preconceived notions and virtually zero expectations aside from some RH goodness.

Right out the gate, let me hit you with a TRIGGER WARNING: this book contains two events/scenes that are so far down the dub-con spectrum, they’re practically non-con.

As far as I’m concerned, they could even be considered full on rape.

Spoiler

One of them took place right in the prologue. Our FL was heavily intoxicated, completely emotionally distraught and was tricked for a large portion of the sequence into believing she was engaging in sexual intercourse with someone who was pretending to be someone else. When she at last realized the man she was having sex with wasn’t who she thought he was, he literally tied her down and downright forced himself on her while she repeatedly and in no uncertain terms told him to stop. This incident was later rationalized by the FL (maybe in an attempt by the author to try and justify it), as “I kept saying no, but deep down I wanted to have sex with him”.

Personally, I was disturbed and made pretty uncomfortable by the whole thing. Not to mention that the dude kept licking his lips the whole time like a total creep.

Spoiler

As for the second instance, our FL was coerced into having sex with someone she otherwise wouldn’t have done that with ever in million years, while a bunch of people watched from the sidelines.

Not nearly as unsettling as the first instance, but still messed up.

I’m of the opinion that intercourse without consent (preferably explicit, but implicit is also ok if both parties are clear that they’re on the same page) and when both aren’t in full use of their mental faculties is sexual abuse. And while it’s ok to dive into topics such as rape and physical abuse in fiction (dark romance would be boring if it was all vanilla all the time), I can’t help being put off when it’s not addressed as something that is horrible, deeply traumatic and that people should never had to go through. Victims justifying the acts of their aggressors or blaming themselves for someone else’s actions is already something that plagues real life, so I’d hope authors would strive to stay far away from romanticizing or trying to put an erotic spin into rape. Seems we’re not there yet.

Also, there was mention of pedophilia that was never actually directly addressed or commented upon aside from “we initiate kids into our secret society at age 10 by forcing them to have sex with an adult”. Yikes



But, with that unpleasant business out of the way, let’s fully dive into this review.

I’m sure all readers who have blogs or other types of personal accounts where they post reviews all keep some sort of reading journal or something where they can keep track of the books they’re reading at any given time and their thoughts on them.

I, myself, am a one-book-at-a-time kind of girl and keep a notebook where I write down essentially my start and finish dates, reactions and impressions as I’m reading, and then my final rating once I’m done.



Typically, I don’t write more than a single side of a page for any given book. In very few instances I’ve managed to fill a whole page front and back. But for this book I actually filled 3 whole pages single side, which I’d never ever done before. I just kept feeling this need to rant my displeasure at the absolute mess that was this book.



Right off the gate I was already disappointed at how all three male leads (Chad, Jase and Ares) were tall, ripped, super good looking manly dudes with huuuge d*cks. And the female lead character, Ashley, was a pretty, popular, rich girl with big boobs. Unrealistic, overused clichés, meet Dirty, Crazy, Bad.

To make them even more annoying, they were all either complete trash, way overly sensitive, super volatile or a combination of the three. Barely five chapters into the book I was already fed up with them. Which wasn’t remotely helped by the fact that mentions to events and people I wasn’t familiar with (and which must have spawned in other books) kept popping up. On the best of days I find it incredibly presumptuous when an author references stuff from their other books in something that’s meant to be it’s own thing. Don’t be so arrogant as to assume people have read your whole catalogue and are familiar with all of your characters. If they’re gonna carry over between isolated series, fricking provide context for who they are and how they fit into the present story!

The bad mood sundae this book elicited in me, was topped with not one, but two cherries.



The first one was the sheer amount of melodrama that was forced into this novel. Here’s a quote as example:

“Pain glides across my chest, making breathing difficult”

For context, this is our FMC’s reaction to finding out boyfriend #2 won’t be moving in with her and boyfriend #1. She’s emotionally crippled by the fact the dude won’t be living in the same house as her.



Girl, chill tf out. For f*ck’s sake, at barely 19 years old, their brains haven’t even fully finished developing yet. So I get why they acted like utter morons a lot of the time, but come on, you can’t seriously expect me to empathize with this. They were spouting “forever love/ you’re the love of my life” bs when they’re not even allowed to legally drink yet (as per US law). I think it was a huge miscalculation to have the main characters be so young. If the cast of characters had been in their late 20s, and had already been through some failed relationships and other assorted struggles, I feel like the emotional weight would have been way more believable. I just couldn’t muster any sympathy for this bunch of idiots whose world came crumbling down every time something didn’t go how they wanted.



The second cherry on the shit sundae was the sex aspect. Like, imagine Riverdale on a cocktail of meth, crack and whatever else drug out there sends you into an excited, manic state. Now imagine the writers not having a limitation due to age restrictions and being able to go fully R-rated. This book would turn into a plausible plotline in the show then, no joking. Sex anywhere, anyhow, anytime. Again, as a remainder, most everyone in this story was fresh out of high school. Raging hormones are a thing, but when every single character in a book is hopelessly sex-crazed, something just isn’t right.

The first half of this book consisted of nothing but screaming matches between Ashley and Chad (aka BF#1) amidst their sexcapades, Jase (aka BF#2) being a secrets-keeping wet wipe and Ares (aka rapey step-bro) being a sexually predatory, raging asshole with absolutely no explanation given as to why. It pretty much felt like being stuck in an endless loop of suck.



We got a throwaway comment every once in a while about how big, bad and powerful the Luminaries were, but with the exposition being done by telling instead of showing, I got sick and tired of it real damn quick. I was like “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GIVE ME SOME DAMN PLOT PROGRESSION ALREADY!”.

Thankfully, once Ash was sucked into the Luminary world, things finally started moving along. And we got something other than relationship drama happening. The second half of the book was leaps and bounds better than the first. Still, there was very little plot progression and story development. I think this story was very much stretched out to fill two full length books and it shows.



Truthfully, I think this book had great potential, but the execution was terrible. The characters were too young to make their actions and the events the went through believable, and the whole thing was way too melodramatic to be taken seriously. I was thoroughly unimpressed. But I’ll admit I’ll be reading the second book because I’m genuinely curious how this train-wreck of a story will conclude.