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I originally thought this book was going to be Sleeping Beauty by way of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which promised to be interesting. It uses the account of Beauty's awakening where she's woken up by the children she bears of the man who raped her while she slept, which I thought could potentially do quite a bit by making explicit the creepy subtext in 'woken with a kiss.' Unfortunately, while this book actually manages not to mishandle that rape too badly, it also pissed me off almost every other way possible. So, the heroine, Rose, is Sleeping Beauty. She wakes up and learns a) she was raped by a troll while she was asleep, and b) P.S. everyone you know is dead, but c) you too may have a lucrative career in troll-slaying. See, I thought this would go somewhere I wanted! But it quickly gets bogged down in half-elf half-vampire half-troll half-demon babies and a passel of love-interests that I wanted to individually and collectively kick in the goolies. You know that het romance trope where our heroine doesn't know who to trust, Dashing McBroodington, who seems to have a dark secret, or Brooding Dashingworth, who carries a hidden darkness? You know the one. She's almost decided that she loves McBroodington, when some terrible misunderstanding drives her into Dashingworth's arms, and he carries her away, only for her to discover that Dashingworth is in fact a cad, and McBroodington's dark secret is in fact his terrible sorrow blah blah blah? I thought that was where this book was going. Sure, Rose's Fairy Boss (M, to her troll-slaying Bond) keeps secrets and jerks her around, between giving her steamy looks and then disappearing. Sure, her half-vampire, half-fairy apprentice thinks a woman saying "unhand me" is a sign she's being flirtatious. But surely if I stuck around long enough I would get to see one of them given his comeuppance when he was unveiled as the villain? No. Oh my god no. I mean, not only did it drag on for ever, not only did Rose discover, via Mr. Grabass, that what she really yearns for is to be tied down and spanked, not only did Rose sprout fairy wings and turn out to be a 1/4 fairy, half-way through the plot, not ONLY all of this. But then on the last page I discovered that the book was setting me up for a sequel where she settles into a threesome with both these assholes. I shit you not, I think I sat there and swore for five minutes solid.

2020-12-22 14:58