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crothe77 's review for:
Of Earthly Delights
by Goldy Moldavsky
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy
Of Earthly Delights by Goldy Moldavsky is a third person dual-POV YA romantic gothic. When Rose moves from New York to Connecticut after her mother’s death, the last thing she expects is to find a new romance with Hart, one of a pair of popular twins who have a lot of power in Rose’s new small town. When Rose’s new friend Lowell goes through drastic changes, she starts to question Hart and his sister Heather.
I know that Gothic romance can have the room for not featuring a HEA/HFN, but I felt that the structure of the book in the second half veered away from the Romance beats and became more about Hart and Heather and what they have gone through since they were children. If these chapters had been one chapter Rose’s POV and one chapter Hart and then one chapter Rose, I might feel differently. Because of this, I would classify this as a romantic gothic as the romance arc is the driving force, but it’s necessarily a Romance book.
Between Rose and Hart, I actually enjoyed Hart more as a POV character. He’s more introspective and reflective, but the moments when we’re deep in his head paint him as truly sympathetic, especially when we get more of his childhood. His relationship with Heather is also very complex because she’s much less cautious than he is when it comes to the maze in their home but she’s still his sister and she is all he really has left of his family after the death of their mother and the continued absences of his father.
The romance between Rose and Hart is fairly intense fairly fast. Rose spends all of her time over the summer with Hart to the point that she ignores Lowell and her father. It’s something that I definitely do expect of a seventeen-year-old as a lot of teens in the middle of their first love do struggle with remembering that things outside of the relationship do exist. Rose is also aware enough to recognize that she is focusing solely on her relationship, but she’s not sure how to get out of that headspace since she truly does want to spend all of her time with Hart.
I would recommend this to fans of Gothic romance and romantic Gothics looking for a YA with a speculative element and readers of YA looking for something more tragic