To Bleed A Crystal Bloom by Sarah A. Parker: My Review
To Bleed A Crystal Bloom by Sarah A. Parker:
My Review
About The Book
To Bleed A Crystal Bloom
By Sarah A. Parker
Synopsis:
Nineteen years ago, I was plucked from the heart of a bloody massacre that spared nobody else.
Small. Fragile.
An enigma.
Now ward to a powerful High Master who knows too much and says too little, I lead a simple life, never straying from the confines of an imaginary line I've drawn around the castle grounds.
Stay within. Never leave.
Out there, the monsters lurk. Inside, I'm safe ... though at a cost far greater than the blood I drip into a goblet daily.
Toxic, unreciprocated love for a man who's utterly unavailable.
My savior. My protector.
My almost executioner.
I can't help but be enamored with the arcane man who holds the power to pull my roots from the ground.
When voracious beasts spill across the land and threaten to fray the fabric of my tailored existence, the petals of reality will peel back to reveal an ugly truth. But in a castle puddled with secrets, none are greater than the one I've kept from myself.
No tower is tall enough to protect me from the horror that tore my life to shreds.
My Review
Rating: 4.5 Stars
To say I’m not a huge fan of fairytale retellings is a bit of an understatement. They’ve never really done it with me, with the exception of Angela Carter’s masterpiece The Bloody Chamber. So, as you can imagine when I picked up this supposed Rapunzel retelling, I was slightly apprehensive.
However, Disney’s Rapunzel this was most definitely not, and from the very first page, I was sucked into a deeply intense story where emotions seemed to twist and turn more rapidly than the wisteria vines climbing the tower of Stony Stem within Rhordyn and Orlaith’s home, Castle Noir.
Rhordyn was most certainly nothing if not one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever read, but I couldn’t help but like him- I think perhaps that says something more about me than him... I loved the character of Orlaith and her strength, which she many times refused to wield despite being demoralised and beaten down emotionally over and over again. I found the dynamic between captor and ‘captive’ frustratingly alluring at every turn and the spicy scenes in this were definitely so tantalisingly slow burn on Rhordyn’s part (I mean can’t you just give the girl some sex already instead of all this teasing FFS?) they leave you with stomach cramp.
Having said all this, I’ll admit I was disappointed that more lore was not explored, and it felt as though at times the stubbornness of Rhordyn was somewhat detrimental to the story in the fact that his unwillingness to explain what the fuck was going on hindered my understanding of the world, even as I turned the final page. Despite this, the world was interesting and well crafted with a great cast of characters, one of which was Kai, a sea drake who quickly won my heart. Rhordyn made me want to punch him and simultaneously ask him back to my place for a drink, with that broody, hard-to-get, tall, dark, and handsome aspect down pat.
Like I said, as a romance, this was phenomenal, with all the withholding and the wanting and the not having. The tension could not be higher, and I actually found myself sweating as the end of the book approached. I read this in two sittings, and honestly, once the book picked up stride around 25 percent in, it was unputdownable.
As a fantasy though, I’m left wanting. I loved the romance, I loved the enemies to lovers vibe, the cold brooding hero, and the seemingly innocent heroine. I even came to love their eye-wateringly volatile confrontations but was also left hungry for more information on the world and the way it worked. More information on the lore and magic, and who exactly the hell Orlaith is. We had this big reveal near the end, but even then, I still wasn’t sure what that meant in the wider sense of things.
The writing in this was phenomenal, and as a dark romance this for me definitely gets a five star. However, as a dark fantasy romance, I have to dock that down to four, simply because I was left wanting with far too many questions at the end of part one of what appears to be a duology. Still, I greatly anticipate the release of Sarah A. Parker’s sequel, To Snap A Silver Stem, and recommend this to anyone who loves a good tease.
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When I told my Barista, Jess, that I was looking for a long series to hold my attention, she was flabbergasted to discover I’d never read the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or seen the show True Blood, which is based off them. In between customers who had come in for their daily dose of Botany and Beans magic, she got up google and started showing me some of the ovary-busting hotness that is the male half of the True Blood cast. Colour me intrigued. I found myself downloading the first book there and then, right in the coffee shop. This is my review of the first instalment, Dead Until Dark.