Embraced

The prologue starts out with a narrator who does absolutely nothing to gain reader sympathy and honestly made me question whether I wanted to finish the book when I was only on the first page. He waxes poetic about how “bad-ass” he is, after having been bested by a “mark or a stain also known as a mole” in his own group of “soliders, rebels, upstarts, nonconformists or whatever the fuck you wanted to call us.” The rambling continues throughout - and yes those are direct quotes.

Despite the unappealing narrative voice and extremely boring exposition in the prologue, I carried on, hoping that the smutty portion of the book would save it. Unfortunately, that just wasn't the case. Don't get me wrong; I knew I was getting into a dark and messed up story, and that's exactly what I wanted. The trouble is, it takes what should be an intriguing and shamefully hot fetish-fuel premise and turns it into a grotesque snooze-fest.

The writing is clunky and the tenses shift at random, which drew me out of the story every time. Add that to an inconsistent narrator who goes from generally unbothered by the fact a man is violating him to dropping the three-letter f-bomb amongst other homophobia and there just wasn't enough appeal left to salvage this for me... especially when the story ended right as it started to deliver on the content it suggested we'd find inside. What's worse, the actual appeal of the smut is totally destroyed by the aforementioned homophobia and the insistence on calling the male submissive's asshole a pussy. That's not something I come into M/M novels to read, and is just plain uncomfortable.

Were it not for the fact this is just a couple chapters passed off as “an episode of a season” (dear author: that is not how books work), I'd consider giving this a chance to see if there are redeeming qualities, but it's just not worth the time or effort of slogging through. This could have been great if written competently, but ultimately it's a premise done to death in fanfiction of the supernatural and sci-fi genres, so it's hardly as if this is a new and unique concept.