Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Kill Switch

After everything we learn about Damon in the previous books, I was so ready for him to have his own story, redemption, love. I had no idea how Penelope would do it but she knocked this one out of the park. Damon and Winter are now one of my favorite couples ever.

Everything that Damon went through growing up, all the terrible things he’d done, to get to see how he felt about Winter the whole time and how she was always a place of peace for him.

Ugh. Even aside from them, the action and the story just keeps getting better with every book, I don’t know how she does it.

My ONLY gripe is I hate that at the end Winter’s dog Mikhail is never mentioned again in the wrap up/epilogue 🤣

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emilynied's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

I'm sorry, I just don't get this book and it's MMC. Winter was the best part of this for me, so I'll start with her. I really loved the blindness representation and I think the author did a good job of making the story from her narrative realistic and still interesting. She isn't diminished as a role in the story because of her lack of vision and she was still capable of being part of the action and having an entire character arc revolve around her. I loved the descriptions of her dancing and feeling the music and sounds around her and I can't fault her for bringing a literal sociopath to his knees :)

I understand why readers enjoy dark romance and fictional romance so much - it's because it's not real. If it was real, we would probably all be questioning our sanity. I usually don't mind books like these, but I don't get the hype around Damon Torrance, I really don't. His background is dark and the things that he went through are horrible - it explains why he's so messed up in the brain. BUT, I don't think it justified most of the things that he did in the past and present timelines of this book. He tries to kill his best friends in the first book, in the second book he terrorizes all of them and now he's just forgiven. There are, of course, lingering effects and we do see that in this book, but I don't think it's enough. We start the story super abruptly with him getting control of Winter, her sister and her mother just out of no where in his quest to force Winter to be with him and I just think that's gross. He puts her in these weird situations and in my mind, controls her (not letting her leave the house, having security follow her around...). I was so turned off by the first part of this book because of that. I just couldn't fathom how we could go from this to a potential love story.

But, it did happen. I will say, I was kind of convinced towards the end of the book because he felt like a different character and everyone just *forgot* about all the shit he did. The character development just wasn't there for me to explain the switch up. Also, I feel like there was so much of Damon in Kai/Banks' book, but none of them are super prevalent in this book - I would have loved to see more of the present dynamic between him and Banks after it's revealed that they're siblings but that was definitely lacking here.

As far as the storytelling techniques, I think I'm getting a little tired of this series' flashbacks. They are about 50% of the book and particularly in this story, reading the past chapters was so exhausting because they just felt like fillers? I don't know exactly how to explain it but it feels like the present narrative is just waiting for the big reveals in the past, and until that happens, there's a lull in the story which got pretty dull. The present chapters relied too much on the past chapters in my opinion, which also contributed to the eh reading experience.

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kk_123's review

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1.5

the only reason this gets +0.5 is because i liked the backstory. i hate damon as a person and i will never understand how someone can excuse all the things he has done just because he’s "so broken". i’m depressed, sh, have ed, anxiety is off the roof and yeah, it’s not that bad compared to what was happening to him but here i am not trying to sa someone or manipulating people left and right. just because you’re traumatized doesn’t mean you get away with traumatizing other people.

anyone who can forgive him what he’s done is just as bad. don’t ignore it just because he is fictional.

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