Overall: 3.5 rounded to ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Readability: 📖📖📖 (I struggled with how long this one was and put down quite a few times)
Feels: 🦋🦋🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔💔
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡⚡ (I think it led into instalove pretty fast and fizzled the tension to me – they gave in pretty fast!)
Romance: 💞💞💞💞 (I thought there were a lot of really romantic things in here – very over the top fated mates, I will give my life for you actions and protective hero that I liked)
Sensuality: 💋💋💋 (The scenes are not very explicit, language is very poetic instead)
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑 (Her writing is pretty detailed but I think the scenes are pretty average length? Hard to tell on audio)
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥+
Humor: A touch
Perspective: Third person from both hero and heroine
More character focused or plot focused? kind of a mix, but more plot
How did the speed of the story feel? medium? Some parts I thought were slow (very detailed writing)
When mains are first on page together: 6% in person but they are together telepathically before that
Cliffhanger: No this ends with a happily ever after
Epilogue: I didn’t take notes on this, but I don’t believe so
Format: listened to audiobook from the library (Hoopla)

Should I read in order?
This is the first in Feehan’s Dark series.

Basic plot:
Mikhail is lost in feelings of loneliness and despair when Raven reaches out telepathically and consoles him.

Give this a try if you want:
- paranormal contemporary romance
- life mates
- European hero / American heroine
- telepathy
- human / Carpathian pairing
- chess
- predator/prey vibes
- vegetarian heroine
- human is a psychic
- medium steam – there’s A LOT of scenes here, but the language is quite light and some of the scenes are on the shorter side. This might feel higher steam to some readers. Lots of open door but just not much explicitness in writing

Ages:
- hero is 600 years old but looks around 30, didn’t catch heroine but I think near 30?

My thoughts:
I really liked a lot about this one. I loved the first 1/3 and was really pulled into the story. But I am also in my allergic to long books phase, and this book is -so- long. Maybe it’s because I got the authors cut with all the extras – but I was just ready for this book to end multiple times before it actually ended.

I liked the world building here. I liked the idea of this take of a ‘vampire’ being the loss of all feeling and your soul – and carpathian having vampiric elements but also shapeshifting and animal bonds.

I did struggle with the instalove elements here. I want to feel the tension in romance – it’s what I live for! So I felt like they both gave it pretty quickly here and were super in love for most of the book and that left the plot which honestly I don’t really care much about 🤣 I can get behind defeating a villain or a kidnapping or solving a mystery at some point in the book but I felt like it rather took over the latter half.

Still, I am very curious about more from this series and definitely plan on continuing! I think maybe I would like to spread these books out though because they are wordy and involved.

Cock/Hero Stats:

- he’s a leader of his species (Carpathian)
- female women were few, and women started miscarrying more often until there were no women to continue their species
- he can shapeshift
- he can ‘change’ his life mate with 3 feeding sessions
- males have lost the ability to see color when they lose their emotions but it can be restored with a life mate
- most human women can’t be converted or they go insane
- they have the power to put others into a trance to feed on them and make them forget it happens and not hurt them
- they cry in blood
- mates usually die after each other and can’t live without each other
- cock is normal/not really mentioned I think

Content warnings: (This should be taken as a minimum because I could have missed some!)

- scenes of danger/violence/murder/kidnapping/controlling
- thoughts of self harm/suicide
- attempted rape/murder on page

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes: - I got lazy with notes again, so this is an estimate

 
Safe sex: 

  No? I can’t remember and didn’t specifically note but I don’t believe so 

 
Hows the consent? 

  There’s definitely some scenes of dubious consent and nonconsent here. No rape, but the hero is aggressive and pushes the heroine a lot - he also has the ability to kind of coerce/force the heroine to do things like sleep, but she can fight/block it. 

 
3% - telepathy sex
9% - kiss
16% - kiss
17% - 🔥 oral for her, missionary on the library floor with bites
23% - 🔥 missionary
25% - 🔥 bj (short), sex (him holding her?) with feeding
33% - sex?
55% - 🔥 sex
56% - sex but it cuts off
57% - sex but no details
64% - 🔥 missionary
72% - 🔥 sex
99% - 🔥 sex