embershelf's profile picture

embershelf 's review for:

Six Scorched Roses by Carissa Broadbent
2.5
dark fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: N/A
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This novella is quite different from what I usually read—I don’t think I’ve read a vampiric romance since Twilight and Vampire Academy back when I was in middle school. I’m probably not the target audience for this book, so take this review with a grain of salt. 

I had some issues with the prose. While perhaps not objectively terrible, there were certain word choices and phrases that ground my personal gears. For example, the author uses “stepped foot” where the more common and accepted phrase would be “set foot”. “Stepped foot” just looks and sounds so awkward and wrong to me. This is far from the only instance of awkward wording/phrasing, but it’s the example at the top of my mind currently. 

However, every now and again—though less often compared to other books I’ve been reading lately—I would highlight a phrase or passage that I thought was lovely. For example, her description of what the beauty of a god looks like. The metaphors in this passage were quite evocative—I wish there was more of that throughout the novella. Also the bit about the FMC feeling as though “I’d just been put in a version of my childhood home where every measurement had been adjusted by a few inches” was fantastic. 

It’s certainly fast-paced (which I desperately needed after trying to get through The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, which is heinously slow—I’m still slogging through it), but the romance felt rushed to me. I tend to prefer something closer to a slow burn rather than an insta-love. But hey, it’s a novella, so I understand that things needed to progress quickly.

I haven’t read any of the author’s other works, but I’d be willing to give them a chance, especially where there is more room for relationships to develop over time in a more realistic way.