The View Through the Looking Glass
I'm an avid reader and aspiring author with an unhealthy devotion to the written word. From the classics to guilty pleasures and all points in between...I just love to read. My primary focus at the moment is male/male romance, usually with a paranormal element thrown in. This is a place for me to rave about books I loved and rant about those I didn't.
OMG I don't even know where to start. I really enjoyed this book. There were several places in the book where the author could have veered off into melodramatic, overly cliched tropes and didn't so what we're left with is a love story where BDSM is an element but not entirely the focus. In fact, I'd say even people who don't necessarily enjoy D/s or BDSM in their romances would like this book b/c at the core of this story is Leo and Alex and their romance. There were a few things that did irk me (there was a *bit* of the overuse of the word "boy", Alex was a bit too passive in the early going of the book and I really needed more of an explanation/understanding of Alex's family dynamic) but overall this was an amazing read. Even though it was the first in a series and the side characters were probably written with future stories in mind, it never came off like they were just there as plugs for future books. They were fully developed and played integral parts of the plot of THIS story. I never got the sense that the author was simply using them to set up the next installment, which is a feeling that I sometimes get when reading books that belong to a series.
