A review by dancinggnomes
Corrupt by Penelope Douglas

3.5

um, why does everyone on booktok downgrade the amount of fucking creepiness in this -- i dont mean like a thriller, but like actual predatory, SA type of way. a lot of this book is fucking disgusting, especially more in the beginning and damon -- but in blocking out that shit, the romance between rika and michael is decent, still worryingly toxic but it's definitely not the worst thing to occur in this book. i seriously debated continuing on while i was in the first 100 or so pages, because no one told me just how fucked the horsemen are, the literally have serious problems, like i don't care if you were raised wealthy and groomed to perfection and decided you wanted to be different, do with your life as you so choose, but i don't know, maybe have some fucking hint of ethics and emotion!?!? it's giving toxic alpha male rich boy who uses hush money and manipulation when they so please. there were some inklings into their past that made me feel empathy for them, but it no way does that fucking justify their mentalities and actions -- definitely would search the CW before starting because this isn't just some little distant/enemies to lovers, or even a dark romance, it fully normalizes misogyny, assault, and overall creepy pedo behavior for a lot of this. that being said, my personal rating of 3.5 feels so weird because this book is atrociously disgusting for majority of it, dark romance is supposed to be more mystery~anger led, not actual crimes and threats/acts of assault. which is why i feel irked as to having been moderately entertained from time to time, NOT by the actual fucking parts of assault and genuine creepiness, but when they made romance scenes that didn't directly correlate with the problematic-ness of it all. in all, penelope douglas should maybe take a crash course on writing a dark romance not consisting of attempted/actual SA and generalized assault, readers should google CW beforehand, and the story has some scenes -- that if distanced from the other plot features -- are not totally, absolutely, wretchedly, disgusting.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings