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Pestilence by Laura Thalassa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 BUT HEAR ME OUT!

I really did enjoy this book and a 3.5 for me is not necessarily bad. I will be reading the rest of the horseman series simply because Laura Thalassa knows how to write one hell of a cliffhanger. I'm going to do my best to keep out spoilers.

This is an apocalypse romance (duh) and Sara is chosen by chance as the person to attempt to stay behind and try to kill the unkillable. What follows is what can only be described as dark. Pestilence intends to make Sara suffer and takes her prisoner for her (not so fucking feeble) attempt on his life. And this is where I had a hard time staying in the book. It got dark. As a survivor of bad things (including s.a.) some of these scenes were hard for me. The kicker? I couldn't stop reading. I was so invested in their tale and her survival. The book was compelling for me.

What I didn't like?

Ok, I know, not everyone needs a spice level at max, but it would have been nicer to have the moments where Pestilence and Sara were intimate with one another be more....intimate. There were several "fade to black scenes" that just needed more.

The graphic violence was compelling, and don't get me wrong there were several scenes that literally made me gasp and cry. BUT it did make it hard for me to stay connected. I will say that I mentally justified the brutality of this book by it being what it is, an apocalypse based romance. It's meant to be raw.

Ok, so what did I like about it?

This book was hard for me to rate. I bounced from 4 to 3 to 4 back to 3, even considering 4.5. Why? Because the writing itself was SO DARN GOOD! I can't even begin to describe to you how many books I DNF during the week and 9/10 the reason is bad writing or even worse, bad to no editing. This book is written very well and carefully crafted. That alone made me want to give it a 4.

The story allowed me to suspend belief. I can't even begin to explain to you how much I've been needing this. I read a lot of fantasy and you automatically go in with a suspense of belief, but this book did the work for me. I rarely felt myself going "oh come tf on," which is a normal response for me in a lot of romance novels lately. ~AW

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