The heroine is my kind of sassy and capable that I can't wait to get more of. Each obstacle pushed her, forced her to confront her weaknesses then she REFUSED to let that weakness stop her

What Lies Beyond the Veil | Review - Captivated Reading What Lies Beyond the Veil | Review - Captivated Reading

I didn't think this one would top book 1 for me but it did. The loyalty and devotion from Caelum was perfection. I am so glad we got his POV and could see inside his mind and his feelings for Estrella. He is obsessed and absolutely in love and possessive but he also inspires her to find her strength. Author’s Note: This book is intended for readers who are 18 and older. It contains mature language, graphic violence, and explicit content with darker elements. This is book one in a series and ends in a cliffhanger. what else? yes there's a lot of sex. there's nothing inheritably wrong with that, but it made me doubt if we hadn't changed genres to erotica because of how much there was, which i don't think helped for the actual plot. again, this one might be that i'm not the target audience (if it's smut i want to read, ao3 is always a perfectly fine stop as far as i'm concerned, and free. i'm not the target for erotica books) You are slowly pealing away at the history and finding out more and more information about the past and how things actually work (rather than what humans implemented into history). I love the connection of greek mythology mixed with the Fae world.

Toys

We have the fated mates trope, which is a common concept we encounter in fae books and I've grown to expect it in these books, and here the mates are marked. Okay so this was good. The beginning, to me, felt a little slow and took me a little to get invested. By 50%, not a whole lot had happened, but the last 25% got me super invested.

What Lies Beyond the Veil: your next fantasy romance

For a second book, I wanted....better secondary characters, more Estrella and Caleum: fight fight fight kiss kiss kiss, the lord to die, and what is their actual plan for returning to society? There is so much shoved into this novel I couldn’t keep up and I didn’t want to. Instead of just focusing on 2-3 plot points, we got 5-6 and things jumped around so much that I didn't know what was going on. Estrella mentions that she either wants to die, would be fine with dying, should die, or is owed death at least 20 times throughout this novel. It’s concerning and also harmful. I mean those are all really great plot points!! But we never get anywhere with them in this first book :(I do wish the author would bring more to the characters personalities. There's always one trait that dominates them. Also, the author really needs to do something about the constant traveling, it's tiresome. This book was gross, and I don't mean the porn-heavy bits, although those were also plentiful and some of them quite gross, but not all of them. It was gross how the MC was character-assassinated in the interest of serving the author's goals of writing more sex scenes. It was gross how both violence and death were fetishized. It was gross how trauma was used as a tool by the male MC to get what he wanted from the female MC. This is a character who is supposedly centuries old, behaving like a cave man, storming out in a huff and unable to control basic emotional impulses. Leaving it to his comparably infantile 'mate' to soothe his needs with sex even when she's terrified of him. Sorry but I couldn't get past how unbelievably stupid the whole thing was. The world-building is brilliant and I am disappointed that I was not given enough. Within this world there is the human realm (Notherek) and the fae realm (Alfheimr) separated by a magical barrier known as the Veil. For 400 years, the Veil protected the humans from the Fae of Alfheimr, who used to hunt humans who were their mates and claim them. Then, we died on their swords. All of that changes the day the Veil shatters, unleashing the fae upon our world once again. The magic of faerie marks those of us they mean to take, but the Mist Guard protecting Nothrek will kill us all before they let the fae have us. There's no choice but to flee everything I've ever known, not if I want to live to see my twenty-first birthday as a free woman. Overall, I was intrigued by the storyline and worldbuilding, however, the characters and romance fell short for me. Regardless, I am curious as to what happens next, so I may read the next book.

What Lies Beyond the Veil Lizzie Stewart’s review of What Lies Beyond the Veil

Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown Let me grab my spyglass and my binoculars, because I'm on a mission to find this book's plot. Oh wait! There isn't one. And if there is you already know how everything's going to go down because you've read it 393793 times before, namely in FBAA mostly. Throw a little bit of the ACOTAR world in there and you're good to go. I thought I’d do a reread just before book 2 comes out next week! I forgot how much I loved the world building in this book. Estrella is from ultra religious, misogynistic society steeped in poverty that completes yearly human sacrifices. On the day she is supposed to die, the misty veil separating the fae and human realms falls and all hell breaks lose. On her journey to escape, she meets the handsome and dangerous stranger, Caelum, who, like Estrella, is fae marked and destined to a mate with a fae.

Games

sprinkled liberally throughout this book. It read like mewling drivel. And honestly after reading the sex scenes, I almost wonder if this author has ever actually had sex? I'm voicing this as someone who understands a setup contradiction statement (ie "You'll never defeat me!"--villain) playing out as foreshadowing for that exact thing happening later on in the payoff. This was not that. Either the characters in this book have the memory of goldfishes, or their EQ is in the single digits. DNF at 56%…life’s too short to read books that I can already guess the ending of (and it’s annoying). Reread #1 (May 2023): Lovely reread! I liked this one much more the second time around because I already knew what was about to go down and could appreciate it more. My anxiety was much better because of that too. Book #3 here I come! I did enjoy this book and of course, I still want to read the next book coming out in the series but I'm just hoping that number three will have some more action and creative spicy scenes! Caelum didn't hesitate to make his intentions clear to Estrella and I love when men do this — no beating around the bush and he never once pushed her.

Goodreads What Hunts Inside the Shadows by Harper L. Woods | Goodreads

caldris is still as awful as he was in book one. this guy is supposed to be centuries old and yet several times basically loses it when estrella tells him she needs some more time. he's violent and demanding and i find him childish... and it just escapes my mind how i'm meant to find him a good romantic partner for estrella. i just don't like this whole 'he becomes mindless with rage' thing, it gets on my nerves. estrella is boring for the most part so she's not compelling as a main character - she has her moments of showing some sort of a personality, but they happen very sporadically through-out the book and after not caring for most of the book about her, i couldn't bring myself to care about her when she decided to show she had some personality after all. Jealous, Little One?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me as he took another step. “Why don’t you help me erase the memory of the ones who came before you?”

Because the one and only man I’d ever allowed to touch me had turned into a pile of snow when he tried to kill me. It was safe to say, my vagina was unfortunately off limits.” The side characters in this added so much to the story. Holt, the wolves, and surprise faces that I won’t mention because spoilers. As an individual Estrella was a contradiction from start to finish and it was very frustrating. She wanted to be independent, but only when it was convenient. She’d get upset with Caelum’s possessiveness, but acted totally jealous herself. She would say she trusted Caelum with her life, but put a knife to his throat in self defense a scene later.. you get the vibe. A total hypocrite, and it got old real fast. She was also one of the densest FMCs I’ve ever read about. Yes she was naive because of her upbringing, but there is a difference between naive and totally oblivious.. and she definitely leaned towards the latter. Overall, it had great potential but unfortunately failed to deliver. Alas, if the author had developed more before publishing, it would have been a 5-star book for me without any doubt.