amywarnes 's review for:

The Marked and the Broken by Ivy Asher

4.0

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I thought the plot and pacing of this book were stronger than the last, but as I suspected would be the case, there wasn't as much as romance as I would have liked. The sex scenes that were in this book just felt like ticking off a list of obligations. For a reverse harem series, there isn't a lot of group sex, despite the fact the characters keep hinting at it, and it also lacks creativity in the sex scenes. It's annoying having 7 different mates and all of their scenes feeling the same. Torrez's was the only one that felt a bit different in that it was slightly more dominant, but it still boiled down to the same sequence of make out, touch boobs, touch/lick pussy and then have sex. With that characters, there could have been so many combinations and more exciting sexual acts. I get the feeling the author is working up to that in the last book, but it would have been nice to see more of them sprinkled throughout the series, and if we don't see more of that in the next book I'll be really disappointed. My only reasoning for why she wouldn't have more group scenes is that she wanted to establish the individual relationships with Vinna first, except the first intercourse scene involved 2 of the male MCs so that doesn't really make sense 🤔 

Also, it's a minor thing but constantly relying on pop-culture references as descriptions feels like really lazy writing. If I don't know who a person or character that's being referenced is, then I have to go google it to try and get a mental image, because the author often gives no description beyond something like "the human version of The Ghost of Christmas Present from The Muppet Christmas Carol"??

Again, this probably feels like a harsh review for a 4 star book. Overall I liked it and devoured it in a day, but coming into it wanting a RH romance and compared to how good the first one was, this book fell flat for me on the romance side