lilibetbombshell's reviews
2684 reviews

Just not my vibe. 

Are you already a fan of the Dark Witch Academy books? Then you’ll know right away when the events in this book take place, what happens directly after, and what happens in the near future as a coincidence. If you’re not already a fan and Virgo Queen is your first venture into the Dark Witch Academy world then you’ll be more than a touch confused (but it also may entice you to come to our side, where we have super spicy polyamorous romance and it’s oh-so-hot). 

All Good Girl and Apple-Polisher Molly McSnicker wants on her birthday is a real kiss. Since the students at Dark Witch Academy will take advantage of any opportunity they can find to have a party, she’s going to take advantage of the loud music, firelight, pheromones, and alcohol on hand. That’s the plan. So of course it’s thrown off course almost immediately by the chaos reigning at the academy at the moment.  

Mallory McSnicker is one of the most beloved supporting characters in the Dark Witch Academy series. She’s a genuinely kind and good person with a steady presence throughout the books, as well as being heavily involved in one of the series subplots. It’s nice (and likely necessary, given where the series is now) to get to know Mallory as an individual and see how she came to be with her mates, which is in as naughty and imperfect a way that it exists in direct opposition to everything anyone would expect from First Girl and Hall Monitor Mallory McSnicker. 5⭐️

🩶 What to Expect 🩶

🍒 Good Girl, Apple Polishing, Hall Monitor FMC

💣 The Eric Northman of Icarus Academy MMC

🍒 The only Cajun werewolf east of the Greenwich Mean Line MMC

💣 Partying in an unsafe, haunted, and basically condemned medieval dungeon

🍒 Being late to your own birthday party

💣 Stumbling into watching your crushes find ecstasy in a hidden corner is the best gift a birthday girl could ask for

🍒 You live for the chase, I live for the hunt

💣 A kiss worth waiting for

🍒 A literal orgy on the dance floor

💣 He’s so deadly it makes me feel safe

🍒 A grossly neglected and underdeveloped conscience

💣 We have fire drills for when there’s a fire so why are you all panicking

🍒 Class geek to the rescue

💣 My secret identity

🍒 Never mind those dragons fighting in the sky

I was provided a copy of this title by the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Romantasy/Fantasy Series/LGBTQ Romance/Novella/Paranormal Romance/Polyamorous Romance/Spice Level 2

(For the sake of transparency, I have reviewed this novella before as a part of the Beyond the Veil anthology on other sites. This review is different than that review, but not entirely, as some parts of that review ended up in this one.)

Have you ever loved someone so much you wished you could open them up, crawl inside of them, and live in them? Been so obsessed with them that there’s nothing you don’t want to know about them? Been so possessive of them that you wish you could surgically attach yourselves to one another and never spend a moment apart?

Probably not, at least not literally. 

Not Spencer and Kendrick. Two psychotic private black ops agent peas in a pod, these two men embody “emotionally unhealthy relationship”. They’re everything to each other and yet every single wire of what “everything” includes is coated in a casing of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, ignorance, and omissions. Toss in a hefty amount of guilt, fear, and doubt as the result of events that happened in interconnected books prior to this one (this series is spun off from Crane’s Chain Reaction series), and both of these men are constantly clinging to one another even as they obsess that the other is pulling away. 

I’m not going to pretend I care about the plot of this book, because I don’t. I didn’t. It provides a good enough framework for the romance to work, with its themes of obsession gone wrong and the things we do for love, but I have to tell you I was 100% in this book for Spencer and Kendrick. 

🩶 What to Expect 🩶

🍒 Cute aggression (look that up)

💣 Cute aggression dialed to 11

🍒 Adorable in their toxicity

💣 Gray-ace bi-awakening

🍒 Sex positivity all around

💣 Medium burn

🍒 1st-person dual POV

💣 They treat each other like their favorite stuffy

🍒 Treating one another like the most precious thing

💣 You’re my entire world

🍒 You’re the best looking thing I’ll ever see

💣 Platonic kisses

🍒 Definitively non-platonic kisses

💣 A ton of snuggles

🍒 Lots of lap time just about everywhere

💣 Platonic bed sharing

🍒 That’s not platonic bed sharing

💣 Pining like a forest

🍒 You go, I go

💣 Why do we even live in different places?

🍒 Pancakes at all hours

💣 I only wear my glasses when he tells me it pleases him

🍒 Talking shop with my boss while he’s bending someone over his desk

💣 You need to belong to me in every way

🍒 There will be no one else, ever

💣 Property of

🍒 We need therapy

I was provided a copy of this title by the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Book Series/Contemporary Romance/Found Family/LGBTQ Romance/Spice Level 2

It’s messy and chaotic and it made me cry, but that’s family for you. 

Listen to Your Sister isn’t a book I’d normally go out of my way to read, because I tend to like reading about topics I’ve been traumatized by and my relationship with my little brother is one of the most positive things in my life. I read to escape 90% of the time. So a book about an eldest sister’s fraught relationship with her two younger brothers isn’t usually my vibe but the buzz around it was so loud I decided to give it a try. 

I’m not saying it’s perfect. Some of it went over my head and the third act did get a little messy here and there, but this is an utterly fantastic family drama cast through a sharp horror lens with lovely literary prose in the narrative that gives the whole story an epic, hypnagogic feel. 

Calla, Dre, and Jamie are characters I found myself loving to hate and hating to love in equal measure throughout the book. That’s another way of saying they came across as…human. I have never and will never review a book with a POC cast by a POC author and assess the family, culture or dynamics within because I’m as white as white can be, but I can say every negative emotion at play in this book seems more than equal to the trauma both inflicted and feared. 

Trauma lives on in the DNA, and these siblings share a whole pool of it. If you’re a fan of debut authors, supernatural horror, psychological fiction, family drama, and horror written with literary prose I highly recommend it. 

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and the SMP Early Readers Program via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Stars Review/Body Horror/Horror/OwnVoices/Psychological Thriller/Supernatural Thriller

Fan-flipping-tastic. Absolutely everything I hoped it would be and more. Give me fifty million books just like this and I’ll be the happiest bookworm that ever existed. Absolutely no notes. 

Have you ever had one of your most-anticipated novels of the year not only live up to every expectation you had but surpass them? Yeah, that’s Victorian Psycho for me. This book is every gleefully macabre, disturbing, violent, and bloody fever dream I’ve ever had shaking hands with sardonic narrative, razor-sharp wit and tight, smart writing. 

Virginia Feito has made a grisly and hilarious masquerade of Winifred Notty, our protagonist, ostensibly a governess by trade but really just a criminally insane serial killer. Behind her staid grey dress and white wool stockings, Miss Notty not only knows she’s full of darkness that will one day lead her to the gallows, she relishes the idea. She revels in violence, darkness, death, and gore. She’s quite simply one of the most memorable main characters I’ve read in years and I love her all the more dearly for lacking anything one would consider humanity. 

This book is more than evocative or atmospheric; it’s immersive. No sense is spared, for good or for ill. Your sensitivities will not be considered and I’m the type of reader who loves the blunt force trauma of experiencing every event in all of its glory with the darkest main characters literature has to offer. So this Victorian horror comedy was good to the last chop (sorry, couldn’t resist).

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Body Horror/Dark Comedy/Historical Horror/Horror/Horror Comedy/Serial Killer

I think this wants to be a why choose version of The Ritual or something but LORD it goes nowhere and does nothing.