The Boy on the Bridge

Pairing: M/F

Orientation: straight

Identity: Cisgender

Warning: dubious consent, bullying, child abuse

The Boy on the Bridge is Sam Mariano’s newest young adult contemporary bully romance and at just around 700 pages it’s also her longest. I’m not a huge fan of long books; I tend to think that somewhere along the halfway mark they start to feel stale and lag. This book, however, didn’t feel long. I was invested in the story and the characters no matter how often I thought the main heroine was an idiot, but more on that in a bit. Sam Mariano has written one of my favorite antiheroes in Mateo Morelli so the characters have to be exceptional for me to even like them. The main hero, Hunter Maxwell, was extremely likeable and came off as less assholey than Carter Mahoney from Untouchable. Riley Bishop, the heroine, was just a tad too self-righteous and hypocritical, but I didn’t hate her, and for this story she was the person that Hunter needed.

Many, many years ago when I was taking a creative writing course the phrase “show don’t tell” became engraved in my psyche, and that’s exactly what Mariano did in Part One of this book. Too often we get half-assed explanations as to why the hero holds a grudge and must destroy the heroine’s life, but in this book we get to see why Hunter is hell bent on making Riley’s life miserable. Are his reasons just and make sense? Not to an adult reader, but a 14 year old kid whose whole life was upended and drastically changed seemingly overnight because of Riley. Yes. And this is one of the main things that does differentiate this story from every other bully romance out there. We weren’t just thrown into the present and given a lame excuse as to the hero’s behavior. We were shown exactly why Hunter acts the way that he does, why he was angry when he was 14 and why 4 years later he still hasn’t been able to fully let go of his anger.

I liked most of the characters in this book. I liked Riley and Hunter together as a couple, except when Riley whined about not being able to be with him because of certain actions right before she tumbled into bed with him. I liked Riley’s mom, Michelle and her boyfriend Ray. Not gonna lie, I kinda want to read more about Ray. An older man with tattoos sign me up for that one. Hunter’s mom can go eat a bag of dicks though. My favorite character hands down is Ryden? Sherlock. I need his story or a whole series, a la Morelli, about him. But, like not him in high school, but an older more devious Sherlock. Yeah that would be great.

For as long as the book was, the story flowed really well. I didn’t read it all in one sitting, but I never felt that it dragged. There wasn’t a whole lot of plot. It was the epitome of a relationship drama. There was very little going on outside of Hunter and Riley building their relationship, and all the drama revolved around that. I ain’t mad at it because if I wanted to read a complicated book that I needed to take notes on I would read high fantasy or sci-fi not a high school bully romance. It’s not a story we haven’t read before, but few of them are, however, it was more well written than most in this genre which I truly appreciate. I only wish that Riley had more of a backbone and actually showed it instead of just telling us about it.

But, please right older, more devious, evil, possibly bisexual Sherock’s story. (In my head Sherlock is most definitely bisexual who becomes an evil, crimal mastermind, and falls in love with the cop that is investigating his case. I’d name him Brandon Moriarty.)

The book was requested and I was provided a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

January Wrap-up

January 2021, which felt an awful lot like December 2020 part two, is finally over, and it’s time to look at what I was actually able to read throughout the month. I had a very ambitious 24 titles in my January TBR and I didn’t read 24 books in January; I watched more television than I usually do. So out of those 24 books I read 12 and then 5 books that were not on the list. That makes a total of 17 books read for the month. Not bad. So what exactly did I read?

I completed the Morelli Family series by Sam Mariano:
Resisting Mateo book 5
Coming Home book 6
Last Words book 7
Entrapment book 8
Old Flame book 9
I enjoyed the series as a whole; there were some books that were way better than others but as a whole it was extremely entertaining. I’ll be posting a full review of the series in the next couple of weeks.

I also caught up to Giana Darling’s The Fallen Series:
Good Gone Bad book 3
After the Fall book 4
Inked in Lies book 5
Dead Man Walking book 6
So far this series is keeping my interest; there were some character decisions that pissed me off but overall it was a solid series and entertaining read.

From my initial January TBR I also read Land of Big Numbers a collection of short stories about the Chinese experience written by Te-Ping Chen; Roommate the new Sarina Bowen M/M romance which as expected was luke-warm, I’m in the middle of trying to organize my thoughts for a full review of this title; and Bad Habits by Neve Wilder and Onley James another M/M romance which was my favorite read of the month more because of the premise of the book rather than the romance.

Aside from those books on my initial TBR I also read five additional titles:

Bully King by Andi Jaxon part of Kindle Unlimited (KU) a M/M bully romance which veered way too much into religion and guilt associated with being gay and religious for my tastes.
Behind Closed Doors (KU) by Anna Stone a lesbian romance novel which started off strong but then lost steam and kinda fell apart toward the end.
Wicked Saint (KU) by Veronica Eden which wasn’t anything special and could be confused for any number of the hundred of bully straight romances that seem to multiply overnight. This is the first book of the Sinners and Saints series and I was so unimpressed that I’m not gonna be reading the rest.
A Notorious Vow (KU) by Joanna Shupe a historical romance novel set in New York with a deaf hero. I really enjoyed this book and look forward to reading more from Ms. Shupe.
Stripped Love (KU) by Baylin Crow an M/M romance between a stripper and a college student. I prefer Baylin Crow’s sports romances. This was just an okay book. This is book one of Guys Next Door series I haven’t decided whether or not all read more from this series; I’m gonna take it on an individual basis.

I did DNF two books in January which were Not my Romeo by Ilsa Madden-Mills, I didn’t like either main character I stopped reading about halfway through when neither character became likeable to me, and The Chase by Elle Kennedy. I’m not sure if I should even call this a DNF since I only read one chapter and wanted to stab my eyes at how annoying I found the main female lead’s voice in my head.

Den of Vipers by K.A. Knight

Pairing: MMMMF
Orientation: Straight
Identity: Cisgender

Warning: blood, violence, dubious consent, S&M, scenes of abuse and assault

Den of Vipers by K.A. Knight is a reverse harem dark romance revolving around four leaders of the Vipers, the most feared organization in town (no, I don’t know what town, I’m not sure it’s ever mentioned, but some town in either the U.S. or the U.K but definitely not in Asia or Russian), and the feisty, but they don’t know it yet, female that was given to them to pay off a debt. Yes, the plot does sound familiar, it’s a plot that I’ve read in any number of books since the 90’s. But I’m not mad at the premise of the book, I’m mad at the execution and the fact that the plot is virtually nonexistent seeming only to be there as a page filler between either sex scenes or one of the characters thinking about sex and/or how horny they are.

So, Roxanne, who goes by Roxy cuz she’s so feisty, is given to the Vipers by her father to pay off his gambling debt. Her father is a grade A douchebag. There’s four Vipers and they are a walking cliche. All four of them. Ryder, the face of the organization whose cold because he was forced to grow up too fast. Kenzo, Ryder’s brother, a consummate gambler and lover of the group. Garrett the fighter with trust and anger issues who doesn’t trust women. And Diesel, the crazy, funny one. The four of them kidnap Roxy and they all fall in love in the middle of trying to keep the Triad from taking over the city.

And that took 646 pages.

There was a lot of sex in this book. Violent sex. Bloody sex. Rough sex. Sex on tables. Sex in the shower. Sex against windows. It was basically 500 pages of sex. The other 146 is where the plot and character development was supposed to be. Because contrary to popular belief sex, does not develop your character.

Here’s the thing: I love romance novels; I love dark romance novels; I love smut and violence and blood, but it needs to be held together by a plot and characters that make sense and are not just caricatures of what bad mobster are supposed to be all the way down to tattooed bodies and pierced dicks.

And as much as I love smutty dark romances, I could forgive this book for all those things except when it asks me to suspend my disbelief completely and be okay without any sort of character growth.

SPOILER ALERT

About 500 pages into the book, Roxy is kidnapped. While she is trying to get away, she’s in a car accident where her car rolls and then is either stun or drugged or somehow knocked out, honestly I don’t remember. She is then beat up, strapped to a chair with barb wire, tortured for an undisclosed number of hours but many many, her ribs are broken, shoulder dislocated, nails pulled out and you know TORTURED. She then manages to break her chair, free herself, and make her escape. They men are there to save her, but because she’s so feisty and cool, she manages to mostly save herself. She then fights her way through the building, killing anyone that crosses her path. But she’s not done yet, she also, still wearing the bloody clothes from being tortured, goes to save Garrett who was captured and kills Garrett’s ex with her bare hands. She’s not fucking Batman. She did not train in Ninja Mountain or with the fucking military to be able to survive hours of torture without passing out as soon as the immediate danger to her life was gone. Adrenaline only gets you so far.

And the other thing that really made me have a very keen dislike of this book, is the absolutely nonexistent character development and growth. The five people who meet in the first chapter of this book are exactly the same as the five people in the epilogue. They didn’t learn anything, but how could they with the lack of any substantial plot.