A review by corcordium
Deviant King by Rina Kent

dark mysterious medium-paced

2.0

the way this book had arsenal winning football matches and fighting for the championship says everything you need to know on this book's realisticness lmaooo

football banter aside, this book was wack. i've read two of this author's duets and i feel like this particular story was the combination of he hates me and all the lies. on the one hand you have the H who is physically abusive towards the h (just like in all the lies) and then you have the talks of rape play and other kink stuff  (just like in he hates me). i don't know what kind of mental gymnastics y'all needed to do to root for a guy who treated the heroine like that, but i guess i ain't that flexible anymore lol. there's bully romances and the H being a bully towards the protagonist, and then there's being PHYSICALLY ABUSIVE as in smashing her face against the hood of the car, grabbing her arm hard enough it hurts her, sexually touching her when she clearly is not about that (at the beginning of this book at least, which later on turns into an inner monologue of her saying she actually wants it but never expresses it out loud), amongst other things. the same thing happened in this author's other book with the H, and i said the exact same thing in my review:

 the hero being physically abusive towards the h. yeah it's a bully romance yeah it's a 'dark romance' and the author puts an author's note at the beginning saying that if you're not comfortable with dark content then don't read it. i love dark romance, and i don't give a flying fuck if the charcters do awful things, my problem is when the hero gets physically abusive WITH THE HEROINE 

i also never felt the connection between aiden and elsa, and the smutty scenes left me completely unfazed because i didn't feel the chemistry between the characters. the H being an absolute controlling asshole to the point where elsa is not allowed to smile  or talk to another guy was also not it. again, i love dark romance and bully romance, the guys in those books tend to be controlling and alpha-malish, but god this dude aiden was the complete extreme of that.

so what did i like about this? i guess what interested me the most was the mystery surrounding elsa's past. the cliffhanger this book ended on did not provide many answers to the many questions i have but it was enough to hook me onto the next one. i might have some theories as to what happened to make her forget basically her entire childhood and the mystery about what her parents actually did or did not do, so that's the only thing i'm gonna continue with this series. plus i'm interested in reading the side characters' books.
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