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 rnoachi replied to your link “Handbook for Mortals’ Pulled From ‘New York Times’ YA Best-seller…”

What’s going on omfg

LMAOOO. All right Ima try and explain this succinctly as possible. Basically this random-ass ‘young adult’ book, ‘Handbook for Mortals,’ hit the NYT Bestseller List on the #1 Spot for the Hardcover Young Adult Category this morning. Only problem is that literally NO ONE had ever heard of this book before, like nada marketing, publicity, etc. Zilch. It was supposedly published by a company, GeekNation who only announced their publishing arm back in July. 

To hit the Bestseller list, the book would have had to sold at least 5,000~ copies within the first week, but a few people were quick to point out a major discrepancy where the book was literally out of stock everywhere in all major retailers, like legit you couldn’t find it on B&N, Amazon, and so on.  

YA Twitter basically crowd-sourced an investigation where a few anonymous booksellers revealed that they had gotten calls first asking if they were NYT-reporting bookstores, and then received bulk orders of the book but not caring when the books arrived. Soooo essentially what happened was that this book scammed it’s way on to the top of the NYT Bestseller List by figuring out which bookstores reported sales to the NYT (to determine what hits the bestsellers list, the NYT’s methodology takes a sample from various bookstores, and this supposedly changes every week). They then ordered thousands of copies of the book from those stores and only those stores - and by doing so, this was all a scheme in the hopes of driving the book to the top of the bestseller list. 

The main impetus for hitting the bestseller list was for getting a better chance to have a movie adaptation of the book made with a label like ‘#1 NYT Bestselling Book!’ which would have made it more appealing to potential investors. Butttt all of this was discovered and the NYT sent out a revision where they removed the book on the list a few hours ago. 

Someone also compared an excerpt of the book to an excerpt from ‘My Immortal,’ so now there’s a conspiracy theory that the author, Lani Sarem, is actually the author behind that fanfic. She’s also a former music manager who worked with bands like Blues Traveler, and the official Blues Traveler account weighed in and claimed that she was fired for ‘pulling these kind of stunts.’ 

And IN ADDITION to all this craziness, you had the bizarre emergence of random early-2000s celebrities linked to all of this - Lani is apparently JC Chasez’s (from N Sync) cousin who promoted the book on his twitter, and the co-founder of GeekNation (the publishing company behind this book) is Clare Kramer, who portrayed Glory on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and actor Thomas Ian Nicholas (American Pie, Rookie of the Year) was allegedly involved and planning to star in an eventual movie adaptation.

So, yeah that’s what happened in the last 12 hours of YA Twitter lol. 

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Hearts & Other Body Parts Review

Rating: (⅖)

So…. I’ll start by saying...Hearts & Other Body Parts was okay. Not the best of YA fiction but not OVERLY terrible.

I was initially attracted by the cover. Black and red with fun, gothic typography; my aesthetic. Opening the cover to read the synopsis on the other hand, I was hardly as impressed;

“A novel of love and monsters.

Sisters Esme, Katy, and Ronnie are smart, talented, and gorgeous, and better yet . . . all three are witches. They have high school wired until the arrival of two new students. The first is Norman, who is almost eight feet tall and appears to be constructed of bolts and mismatched body parts. Despite his intimidating looks, Esme finds herself strangely -- almost romantically -- drawn to both his oversized brain and oversized heart.

The second new arrival is Zack, an impossibly handsome late transfer from the UK who has the girls at school instantly mesmerized. Soon even sensible Esme has forgotten Norman, and all three sisters are in a flat-out hex war to win Zack. But while the magic is flying, only Norman seems to notice that students who wander off alone with Zack end up with crushed bones and memory loss. Or worse, missing entirely.

Hearts & Other Body Parts is a wickedly addictive novel about love, monsters, loyalty, and oh yeah, a Japanese corpse-eating demon cat.”

Can you see where I hesitated? Around “the nice guy is the only one who sees what’s wrong with his romantic rival and has to “rescue” his crush from thinking she loves the other guy”? Yeah. But hey, I thought, I got through Heartless and ended up liking it more than I thought I would so maybe this one will be a little cringe worthy in the beginning but pull out a decent ending too.     

I was half right. There were definitely parts that made me need to lay down for a minute like #GiveUsASnog, the blatant stereotypes masquerading as inclusivity, the frankly alarming overuse of the term “beautiful girls”...

It never managed to pull itself together in a way that made the ending worth it. About halfway through I found the writing continued to lack and there was hardly any substance to keep me there. I powered through purely for the sake of this review. It wasn’t that it was BAD, just all around lack luster. Certainly not the WORST, but just… boring. 

Honestly though, “not the worst” is probably the best thing I can say about this book. I can appreciate what it was trying to be. A campy bit of romantic horror that played off of big name monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Witches. Nothing more than a bit of fun. Unfortunately the fun wears off in the first few chapters. A good B Horror relies on being so terrible it’s good, making use of overdone tropes but putting enough twist and creativity into it that it comes together into something memorable even if it’s totally cheesy. Hearts & Other Body Parts fails this on the most basic level. Sure, it’s filled to the brim with all the cliches you could ever want in a B Horror, but it doesn’t have the creativity it takes to bring it together. Instead, we’re left with a collection of poorly thought out characters, a forgettable plot line, and an ending that leaves you wondering if the eight hours it took to read was really worth it.

The answer is no. No it was not and yet I bought it because I was promised a good time.

Side tangent, I’ve noticed a trend in formatting when trying to look up published reviews for books. They paste in a summary of the book and then the writer spends one or two brief paragraphs talking about it in the most ambiguous way possible with a couple of buzzwords like ‘witty’, ‘inventive��, and ‘funny’ tossed in for good measure. You’ll also see the phrase, “I was given a free copy of the book for an honest review.” Honest, yet they don’t tell you WHY a book was funny or inventive, and they definitely don’t tell you if the book was bad, honest or not. Marketing at it’s finest.

So yeah, I’m going to tear this bitch to shreds. I’m going to talk about everything in this book and I’m going to do it in the plainest language I can. It won’t be pretty, but that’s the point. I don’t want it to be filled with flowery language because that shit is hard to write and takes away from the point of the message. No fluff, no buzzwords, no mercy. There will be spoilers, so be warned because I’ll be talking about the ending to this book A LOT.

Let’s start with the backbone of a story; the characters. Hearts & Other Body Parts switches point of view chapter to chapter, sometimes in the middle of a chapter and sometimes whenever the fuck it feels like it. This would be fine, especially if the characters had strong voices, but everyone in this book sounds almost exactly the same. It makes for stilted, awkward dialogue as well. Jokes made by characters don’t land because the conversations they were having felt unnatural.

The only one who had some semblance of a narration style is Norman. Norman is not the main character but it felt like Bloom REALLY wanted him to be and ends up as the most fleshed out character in the book. Considering that every single character in this book is a high school stereotype, that’s saying something.

The witchy sisters this book touted to be the main players felt like one girl broken into three that had never been raised together. The summary calls them smart, talented, and gorgeous and they’re exactly that, in that order. They all get to have only one thing according to B Horror laws and they can’t possibly share anything. Yes they lived in the same house, yes they sit at lunch together but nothing beyond that suggests that they're actually related. They riff on each other occasionally like siblings might but there are no mentions of shared interests and we hardly get to see into Veronica or Katy’s lives aside from “one is super hot and likes makeup and the other likes fashion subcultures and dogs”. I didn't even know Katy was supposed to be a jokester until another character pointed out that she was. As for Veronica, the gorgeous one, she’s youngest sister and only fourteen. Creepy.

Esme, the actual main character of the book, falls victim to the “sudden rash decision heroine” trope. She’s shown previously to have been level headed and intelligent yet when, #spoilers, her sisters are kidnapped by the book’s villains, Zack and the Ancient, she’s suddenly running into a death trap by herself without a plan. Of course, she’s stopped in the nick of time by Norman who is still sensible because he’s smart and also a man. It’s an exhausting trope to have to read over and over again in YA books with female leads, especially leads that are supposed to be intelligent planners.

In the end, Veronica and Katy just end up becoming a combined damsel in distress trope. They only exist to give main character Esme someone to save and to push along the finale. Afterwards, we hear that they “recover” but we don’t see any lasting effects. Bad Guy Zack is still left alive. How do they feel about this? We just don’t know. Norman is the most thought out character in the book, but really at his center he’s still an obnoxious “nice guy” and his very existence feels almost as if the author was pushing an agenda. “Look girls, he may be ugly but he’s intellectual and kind! He’s obviously the correct romantic choice because he’s a NICE GUY.” Norman himself doesn’t do anything overly untoward but the author pushes Esme and Norman together in the worst way. Bad Guy Zack is handsome and the guy all the girls want but he’s just another dumb jock without substance who will cheat on you. So obviously the right choice is Norman.

Having a solid friendship just isn’t an option and looks aren’t EVERYTHING, until, oh wait, they are. In the end even Esme is so unconvinced of her attraction to Norman that she feels she has to drug herself with a love potion to feel anything and drug HIM with a beauty potion in order to make him lovable--which is ableist by the way--and sends the message to disabled readers, “sorry but if you're not at least semi conventionally attractive, no one can truly love you.” The fact that she feels required to be with him because he loves her says it all, really. Speaking of Bad Guy Zack though, his ending was one of the most disappointing parts of the book. Throughout the story we are shown glimpses of his relationship with his vampiric master, the Ancient. In the beginning we’re told that the Ancient chose Zack for a very specific reason. What that reason was, we’re never really told but I’m guessing it’s somewhere along the lines of “he’s hot” and because he’s hot, it makes it easier to draw in women to serve as food sources. The Ancient coerces Zack into doing his bidding and kidnapping women by enthralling him with the use of his vampiric mesmer abilities. Of course, when Zack fails (or whenever the Ancient feels like it apparently) he’s beaten and tortured for hours. These beating are apparently so terrible that the only thing that saves Zack is his fledgling vampire durability; if he was human, he’d only last for a few minutes.

So to reiterate, Bad Guy Zack is actually Abused Minor Zack forcibly coerced into kidnapping girls by his father figure/master. Yes, he’s a player, yes he strung along the sisters in order to eventually kidnap them but if he didn’t he would be tortured. He’s an abused minor repeatedly shown to have remorse for his actions along with other qualities that could have made for a potentially decent redemption arc but instead he is “adopted” by Norman’s father and instead of receiving therapy or support, he submits himself to to being locked in a cage and wanting to take “any punishment that could be meted out to him,” including his own self harm which was described as “absolutely medieval” in design. The idea that a victim of of this type of psychological and physical abuse would would consider himself guilty and deserving of punishment isn't unrealistic but the fact that self harm to the extent described was being seen as acceptable is laughable at best and disgusting at worst. I’m not sure whether to look to the narration of Esme or the writer himself for this but considering Esme’s upbringing, it wouldn't make much sense for her to see any amount of self harm or abuse as normal. As for the Ancient himself, he suffers from a case of overhyped villain. We’re shown repeatedly that he’s willing to do terrible things and told repeatedly that he’s extremely powerful but in the end, it takes all of 7 pages to take him down and I’m being generous with that number. The majority of those 7 pages is even spent with him TALKING about how he’s going to kill Esme without doing anything to support that. The final battle, if you could call it that, is entirely fluff and any sort of threat that the Ancient might have posed instantly fell short the second he started talking.

Esme also has the support of her not-so-japanese, not-so-corpse-eating, demon familiar Kasha who takes the form of a cat and information dump character right along with demon ex machina for the final battle. There is literally no other reason to this character. The chapter that has him get involved with the fight is literally called “Deamon Ex Machina”.  You could have replaced him with a decent google search and the story would have lost nothing. It would have even saved the book from one of its multi-page info dumps and a terrible joke about gophers used 5 too many times. The ending might have even been halfway decent without Kasha. The Ancient might have become the threat he should have been and we could have had an exciting, climactic fight. Instead we got a ridiculous game of cat and mouse that had the terrifying villain reduced to a mess resigned to his fate. Boring.

All of the side characters had this sort of simplification of personality too. The LGBT characters especially suffered from this. Esme’s mother is referred to as a lesbian while also being absent, evoking that age old “gay people are terrible parents” adage. Nick, the background football player, had to be shown by white cis-het Esme that being gay was okay, after which he immediately becomes a fashion obsessed trope despite no hint of him showing interest in it before. You can tell he’s also meant to become a comic relief character, but the jokes are entirely centered around him being gay and effeminate. If that wasn’t the worst, the only trans inclusion comes in the form of the Goddess who offers to show Esme her genitals as proof of being intersex without any prior prompting. Because thats a thing that people do.

Hearts & Other Body Parts was touted for its humor and intelligence but the jokes more often fell flat, and the intelligence came only in the form of page long wiki-esque information dumps and latin terms tossed in for the sake of sounding smart. It fails to be smart in ways that matter. The lack of character depth is one thing, but there were times when I had to set book the book down for a moment because immersion was completely broken by a plot hole or interaction that did nothing to support the character, story, or humor.

For instance, after Esme finally breaks free of Zack’s hypnosis, she makes her way to Norm’s house to meet his father Dr.Frank: a scientist that has important information on vampires. Shortly after she arrives, so does football player, stereotypical meathead Jackson. Earlier he had been in a fight with Zack and left him with extreme anxiety regarding speaking about the fight. Jackson is looked over by Dr.Frank and then given a cocktail of anti-anxiety drugs and narcotics to make him sensible and able to explain who hurt him. Afterwards, Jackson is never mentioned having an issue with panic attacks again. While it’s mentioned he doesn't sleep much, hinting at the anxiety, this doesn't cause him any issue with functioning in general or assisting Esme with tracking the vampires. That is:

A.) Not how sleep deprivation works. B.) Not how anxiety works. C.) Suggests that not only did Dr. Frank medicate an underage child without parental consent but that he CONTINUED to supply this child with medication.

This is one of the most jarringly immersion breaking instances but there are several more like it along with a multitude of smaller instances such as typing an entire url instead of using the search bar, purposefully cooking a brisket until it’s dry, and not considering that other LGBT people may exist outside of the chosen three which would have entirely messed up the “only some men are immune to vampire mesmer“ thing. It leaves one wondering if Bloom thought a lot of this through, or if he simply wrote himself into a corner a few times and had to come up with something on the fly to fix it.

This book was a struggle to read and even now, I’m struggling to come up with anything positive to balance out the negative. The grammar was decent. The sentence structure wasn't bad, but decent syntax only means so much when it’s the content itself that’s the issue. I’m not asking for a serious drama from a book meant to be along the same lines as a Syfy special, but I am asking for at least some effort. The plot was a forgettable ode to nice guys, the humor was flat, the pacing was off, the characters were walking cliches, the representation borderline phobic, and the ending was entirely anticlimactic. The writing wasn’t the WORST but it wasn’t good either. It was as if Bloom had only wanted to get a book published and nothing more so he wrote the most generic crap he could manage then tossed in some black and red with a Japanese cat as a hook. I can't say it didn't work because I spent money on this snooze-fest but damn. Reading Hearts & Other Body Parts was a slog. If it had been terrible, it might have met its B horror mark. It was a slog not because it was bad, but because it was just plain mediocre.

Ira Bloom, nice try but for your next book, a little more effort would be appreciated. Thanks. #SorryNotSorry.

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Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance, Horror

Tags: B Movie Horror, Hetero Female Lead, F/M, Sisters, All Competing for Same Guy, Dark Romance, Dark Humor, Soccer, High School, Witches, Magic, Frankenstein’s Monster Re-Written, Vampires, Japanese Corpse-Eating Demon Cat

Warnings: Physical Parental Abuse, Emotional Parental Abuse, Violence, Death, Under Age, Dub-Con, Ableist Language, Homophobic Stereotypes, Homophobic Jokes, High School Stereotypes, Sexist Language, Plot Holes

Summery: Sisters Esme, Katy, and Ronnie are smart, talented, and gorgeous, and better yet . . . all three are witches. They have high school wired until the arrival of two new students. The first is Norman, who is almost eight feet tall and appears to be constructed of bolts and mismatched body parts. Despite his intimidating looks, Esme finds herself strangely -- almost romantically -- drawn to both his oversized brain and oversized heart. The second new arrival is Zack, an impossibly handsome late transfer from the UK who has the girls at school instantly mesmerized. Soon even sensible Esme has forgotten Norman, and all three sisters are in a flat-out hex war to win Zack. But while the magic is flying, only Norman seems to notice that students who wander off alone with Zack end up with crushed bones and memory loss. Or worse, missing entirely. HEARTS & OTHER BODY PARTS is a wickedly addictive novel about love, monsters, and loyalty. And oh yeah, a Japanese corpse-eating demon cat.

FULL REVIEW COMING SOON

Where To Buy:

Amazon

Barnes&Noble

Author’s Website

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Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance

Tags: Alice in Wonderland Rewritten...Again, Hetero Female Lead, F/M, Unrequited M/M, Victorian Influenced Nobility, Arranged Marriage, Slow Burn, Hella Tart Baking

Warnings: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, Emotional Parental Abuse, Violence, Death, Gay Friend in Love with Straight Lead, Fat Shaming

Summery: Catherine may be one of the most desired girls in Wonderland and a favorite of the unmarried King, but her interests lie elsewhere. A talented baker, she wants to open a shop and create delectable pastries. But for her mother, such a goal is unthinkable for a woman who could be a queen. At a royal ball where Cath is expected to receive the King’s marriage proposal, she meets handsome and mysterious Jest. For the first time, she feels the pull of true attraction. At the risk of offending the King and infuriating her parents, she and Jest enter into a secret courtship. Cath is determined to choose her own destiny. But in a land thriving with magic, madness, and monsters, fate has other plans.

Where To Buy: 

Barnes&Noble

Amazon 

Author's Website

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Genre: Fiction, Young Adult, Heist Fic 

Tags: Hetero Male Lead, Disabled Lead, Gay Supporting Characters, Alternating POV, F/M, M/M, Industrial Age Magic, Team Dynamics, Dark, Gothic, Mafia Fic, Mutual Pining, Angst, Reasonable Reactions to Trauma, Sequel, Love Doesn’t Solve Everything

Warnings: Major Character Death, Series Typical Violence, Gore, Brief Depictions of Noncon, Child Abuse, Brief Depictions of Child Prostitution, Mentions of Slavery

Summary: Kaz Brekker and his crew have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn’t think they’d survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they’re right back to fighting for their lives. Double-crossed and left crippled by the kidnapping of a valuable team member, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz’s cunning and test the team’s fragile loyalties. A war will be waged on the city’s dark and twisting streets―a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world. 

Where to Buy: 

Amazon 

Barnes&Noble 

Author’s Website

[mainstreamtags]

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult, Heist Fic

Tags: Hetero Male Lead, Disabled Lead, Implied Gay Supporting Characters, Alternating POV, F/M, Implied Unrequited M/M, Industrial Age Magic, Team Dynamics, Dark, Gothic, Mafia Fic, Mutual Pining, So Much Mutual Pining, Angst, Reasonable Reactions to Trauma, If You Liked Artemis Fowl You’ll Like Kaz Brekker

Warnings: Violence, Gore, Death, Implied Child Prostitution, Implied Sexual Assault, Child Abuse, Ableist Language, Animal Abuse, Non Consensual and Consensual Drug Use, Implied Gay Friend in Love with Straight Lead

Summary: Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone…

A convict with a thirst for revenge A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager A runaway with a privileged past A spy known as the Wraith A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Kaz’s crew are the only ones who might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.

Where to Buy:

Amazon

Barnes&Noble

Author’s Website

[mainstreamtags]

I started a new blog @mainstreamtags, it’s slow going but I’m gonna try my best!!

The one thing that hit me when I got back into fandom was reading original fiction and running into shit like animal abuse or super-casual sexual violence and being like “Well, if this had been tagged properly, I’d have noped out after the first lackluster chapter.” Fucking tags, man.

And it’d be one thing if mainstream fiction was more or less predictable, but there’s so much of that sort of thing out there.  Everybody’s a fucking edgelord.  I signed on to read about a homicide detective with PTSD from ‘Nam trying to find a murderous group of bank-robbers who met in-country, why am I now reading two in-your-face pages about an underage street-kid’s side-job of subsistence prostitution?  That wasn’t part of the deal, book.

I mean, the point of tagging is filtering out just as much as it is filtering for, and the fact that everything’s covered if the writer has done their job means that it works for everyone.  People who are absolutely Not Down with whatever can avoid it.  People who aren’t thrilled about it but are willing to trust the author if everything else seems to line up with what they want can bail if that’s not the case.  People who live for it know to shuffle it to the front of the line.

But books and stories out in the wild don’t come with tags.  You know how Julie of the Wolves is summarized? “When her life in the village becomes dangerous, Miyax runs away, only to find herself lost in the Alaskan wilderness.” You know what actually happens? The protagonist is married off at the age of 13, on the condition that the relationship remain platonic until she and her husband–I think he’s 14 or 15?–are of a suitable age to consummate the marriage. She runs away after he tries to rape her.

Like, it’s a good book.  Adult-me is glad I read it.   But if the description on the back had been any shade of accurate about why the protagonist flees into the fucking wilderness, child-me would definitely have waited until I was on the older edge of the 8- to 12-year-old “recommended for” spread.  And it definitely colored how I approached books after that.  I mean, I was a prolific reader as a kid.  That didn’t change.  But most of the books I wanted to read weren’t something my friends had read, and I’m one of those impossibly-old thirty-somethings who’re still somehow at large instead of being packed off to the old folks’ home, so I couldn’t even check online.  There wound up being an extra layer of caution–especially around books with female protagonists–about whether or not the book was going to pull the rug out from under me.

Now, with fanfic, there are several apps and scripts and widgets that will let you wave a digital wand and stuff everything you don’t want to read right down the internet oubliette and slap a “This work is hidden!” sticker over the hole.  I know this because I’ve grown up to be an incredibly picky reader, and there are a couple of fandoms and ships where I’ll run a search and 90% the results field will be happy little “You don’t even have to read the fucking description, because you already know you’ll hate it!” buttons instead of works.

Regular novels, even now?  Good fucking luck.  Maybe if the book’s been popular enough and you’re down with spoilers, you can find a detailed synopsis or two out there that will tell you if there’s a gratuitous chapter on bear-baiting or the least-necessary rape scene of all time. Most of the time you’re on your own, and even fairly well-reviewed novels will contain a surprise B Plot revolving around child sex abuse that the rest of the book doesn’t even come close to earning, justifying, or dealing with appropriately.  The last book I picked up without vetting first had a chapter-two rape scene that I don’t even think the author understood was a rape scene.

And obviously this is a thing that’s been happening since I got old enough to start reading YA books where the dog dies and everyone has TB and the real monster was the patriarchy all along, but it wasn’t something I’d been able to articulate until presented with a solid alternative.  Having a pile of fiction that I could pre-sort to be incest-free (looking at you, Flowers in the Attic), CSA-free (I skipped Gentlehands; turns out Grampa was a Nazi, not a child-molester), and rape-free (just so many fucking books, you guys) was like this literally impossible dream.

Which, you know, you can talk about how much of fanfiction is or isn’t garbage, either in content or execution, but it’s at least well-labeled garbage by people who overwhelmingly seem considerate of their readership.

[mainstreamtags]

Genres: Young Adult, Historical Fiction, Romance

Tags: Hetero Female Lead, Gay Male Supporting Character, Alternating POV, F/M, Unrequited M/M, Love Triangle, Alternate History, Political Drama, The Ottoman Empire, Dark, Violence, Death, Religion, Islam, Christianity

Warnings: Misogyny, Internalized Misogyny, Homophobia, Abuse, Sex Mentions, Brief Depiction of NonCon, Medieval Pedophilia, Child Abuse, Gay Friend in Love with Straight Lead

Summary:  No one expects a princess to be brutal. And Lada Dragwlya likes it that way. Ever since she and her gentle younger brother, Radu, were wrenched from their homeland of Wallachia and abandoned by their father to be raised in the Ottoman courts, Lada has known that being ruthless is the key to survival. She and Radu are doomed to act as pawns in a vicious game, an unseen sword hovering over their every move. For the lineage that makes them special also makes them targets. Lada despises the Ottomans and bides her time, planning her vengeance for the day when she can return to Wallachia and claim her birthright. Radu longs only for a place where he feels safe. And when they meet Mehmed, the defiant and lonely son of the sultan, Radu feels that he’s made a true friend—and Lada wonders if she’s finally found someone worthy of her passion. But Mehmed is heir to the very empire that Lada has sworn to fight against—and that Radu now considers home. Together, Lada, Radu, and Mehmed form a toxic triangle that strains the bonds of love and loyalty to the breaking point.

Where to Buy: 

Amazon

Barnes&Noble

Author’s Website