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A review by emcgillivray
Bound and Beguiled by Rowan Merrick
3.0
Ultimately, Bound and Beguiled is fun and sexy. However, it starts in a pretty traumatic place for Tereza, where she escapes from her evil finance, who sabotages their birth control to force her to have a baby, and her mother's tyrannical influence. Tereza has had an abortion by the time the book starts and escapes from the cult her family is part of. I wonder how many of these types of pregnancy plots we'll have in romance since the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
This is an urban fantasy world, and Tereza finds a safe place with her cousin (the heroine in book 1, which I haven't read) and her cousin's two magical fae partners. She gets a job at a local pub and quickly falls for 4 very flirty, furred monsters who are animal shifters based on Welsh mythology. This is definitely some insta-lust/love.
With a few bits of magic here and there, the sex leans heavily into realistic and well-done BDSM. Much of it was very hot.
The stakes felt very high at points but then disintegrated. Tereza's ex stalks her, but she's kept entirely safe and doesn't leave the warded safehouse. She arrives at the wedding to truth tell — which she does — and while the outcome is cathartic — a lot of the book is reckoning with women not being believed about their abuse — it seemed a tad anti-climatic. However, I did want to see full fanart of her riding on Emyr in his house form and in her "wedding" attire.
As a novella, there wasn't quite enough time to give deep characterization to all of Tereza's paramours, plus all the world-building with other characters that Merrick was doing.
This is an urban fantasy world, and Tereza finds a safe place with her cousin (the heroine in book 1, which I haven't read) and her cousin's two magical fae partners. She gets a job at a local pub and quickly falls for 4 very flirty, furred monsters who are animal shifters based on Welsh mythology. This is definitely some insta-lust/love.
With a few bits of magic here and there, the sex leans heavily into realistic and well-done BDSM. Much of it was very hot.
The stakes felt very high at points but then disintegrated. Tereza's ex stalks her, but she's kept entirely safe and doesn't leave the warded safehouse. She arrives at the wedding to truth tell — which she does — and while the outcome is cathartic — a lot of the book is reckoning with women not being believed about their abuse — it seemed a tad anti-climatic. However, I did want to see full fanart of her riding on Emyr in his house form and in her "wedding" attire.
As a novella, there wasn't quite enough time to give deep characterization to all of Tereza's paramours, plus all the world-building with other characters that Merrick was doing.