Review by satashii - Does It Hurt?

satashii 's review for:

Does It Hurt? by H.D. Carlton

0.25

dark tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

I’d give this zero stars if StoryGraph would let me. 4/5 🌶️ (the spice score is decreased by how terrible the sex is written and it became… boring in a dark romance).

I kept hoping that the female main character would suddenly get a personality transplant and become less of a wasted space of humanity… yet it didn’t happen. Sawyer is plainly unlikable and wears this like a badge throughout the book as she picks whichever choice is most likely to cause either herself or someone else damage. Every time I might have started sympathizing with her, she would do something that was such a profound character turn off she had me noping out and putting this book down to wait for me to brace myself and remember that I hate DNF’ing books (yes I know there’s only so little time and so many books. It’s a personal failing and I’m gonna gripe about it).

The couple in this book have zero reasons to stick together and neither of them is particularly likable nor do they have reasons to jump from loathing to ‘I love you and would die for you.’ Every other (and sometimes every) chapter has them having sex and tbh, the sex isn’t that good. There’s a lot of hate fucking going on in this book and then it supposedly changes but still stays rough.

This book is a dark romance (which I understand) but the connecting bits don’t make up for the supposedly hot sex™️ which I’d like to argue that it’s not that well written or particularly hot (look, I object to how often the female main character talks about her clit throbbing and squirting—it ain’t sexy nor is the fact that the male character’s best described feature is his veiny cock. The sex weirdly got repetitive given how much of it there is and almost skippable because it was on the verge of boring which degraded the spice score of a book that is basically just one sex scene loosely connected to another.)

The B plot (because the A plot was the terrible repetitive sex) is them being stranded on an island with a creepy lighthouse keeper and it felt thrown in there to remind us that there was a theoretical plot rather than being forgotten for 90% of the hate fucking.

Another nitpickcy issue is that in the print copy I read the first pages of each chapter have a shark or lighthouse graphic covering the type that, while interesting, made it hard to read the print. The sharks that were used as icons for scene breaks were also weirdly large. This book did not need to be 400 pages. The cover is kinda cool? That’s a positive. The first page telling baby shark to to step aside because daddy shark is here was what got me to read this terrible waste of pages.

I did bother to make the playlist listed at the front and it was meh if uneven.

TL:DR? I’ve read better stuff on Watt Pad that I didn’t pay to read and I object to having paid for this schlock which did in fact hurt to read and I only finished it out of spite and stubbornness.

Content warnings: dark romance/sex, rough sex, mentioned incest, unlikable MCs, breath play including almost drowning, pain kink, sex after injuries, not enough shark content.

Category: Contemporary Romance. Dark Romance. Terrible books that you shouldn’t pay to read. Book tok lied yet again.

Content Warnings