Post-apocalyptic romance review (MF and MM subplot).
Do I recommend it? Not at all.
Covered: ◊ Ensnared ◊
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Premise:
The book follows Eden, a librarian who survived in a post-apocalyptic world and who, at the beginning of the story, flees hunters and encounters five ex-Army Rangers who offer her protection… for her body. Here the reverse harem story begins. It blends survival themes with BDSM dynamics and found-family relationships as Eden navigates this arrangement with the five men while trying to survive.
I picked this one up because of the rating on Amazon and Goodreads (too high). What I wanted to check was after the final war setting, as well as the MM relationship subplot. I wanted to compare it to my post-apocalyptic world building for MM post-apo romances I write.
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First things first: what was fine.
The writing achieved readability, navigating the challenge of switching first-person perspectives.
What was also okay were the first chapters: Eden, the main female character (the librarian), is written here in a way that I could believe she indeed prepared and survived the war.
However, what happens next kills all the stuff.
Now: the bad.
Eden annoyed me at many points from the first moment sex happened. Like she lost all her brain. In the first chapters, she was pictured as an educated woman, a librarian, reading a lot of books. She had a traumatic marriage, a traumatic childhood (and a poor one), but despite many self-esteem issues, she was resourceful enough to survive for so long. I believed this image from the beginning of the book, so the moment she acted idiotic, endangering the shelter, those men, from then on, and with every silly decision or thought of hers, I couldn’t stomach her.
The world building. I would appreciate more of this world through action, as at the end of the book, or the way it started. The middle of the book is not a believable post-apo situation: the house is luxurious (every bedroom has a bathroom, but it was not a hotel building, but a private house), a few years after the apocalypse, they have a running dishwasher (I can’t imagine how many dishwasher tabs they had to stack; besides, who does this when the war happens so fast?), silk shirts, coffee, chocolate chips for pancakes, and so on. Everything seems easy to get, or they had it stacked, but, again, who does it like that? Who stacks chocolate chips in an amount that lasts 4 or 5 years after the great war?
Also, not to forget: they also had stacked boxes of condoms, but what a pity, only one is left. No comments.
The romance. I checked it to see the MM subplot, and this one is good, if not for the dramatic tone of voice of a character who is in his forties and is a psychologist. However, the FM vs five guys romance is marketed as a reverse harem, but it reads more like a poly situation, and to add, not rewarding the girl here.
Spoilers ahead. Sex is everywhere, until the situation is like: one rejects Eden because he wants another man – and this man, even if he sleeps with her, wants, in fact, the other man that wants him. The other rejects her until some point because he pines for his ex, but even when he finally spanks Eden (yes, spanks her), it doesn’t feel like he is over his ex. The other one wants Eden, but thinks more about his friend (the one thinking about his ex) than about the girl he is having sex with at the moment.
It leaves only one that wanted to have sex with Eden and delivered it with proper spice on this book’s pages… and here, another brief comment, the one about the main female character. This also didn’t land for me: all the time, when she is either accepted or rejected, what matters to her is this big question: does he want to fuck me? All other things are not even secondary; they are so far on her list of priorities that it embarrassed me, somehow.
Last but not least.
The book ends on a cliffhanger, and of the sort that I, as a reader, don’t appreciate. So, I won’t continue (edit: I’ve checked reviews for the next book, and the cliffhanger is there too.)
From my perspective, if someone wants a book that is easy to read (it is!) and full of spice (it’s there), and doesn’t care about logic too much, then it’s fine. Not for me, though.
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