Bound to the Shadow Prince follows Princess Candra as she is unexpectedly thrown into a role she was not expecting. Candra is the Princess with no actual responsibilities, has a ‘blood curse’, is barren, and overall is not expected to do anything except marry someone eventually for an alliance. Due to these circumstances, she parties, she sleeps around, and is overall very privileged. In her world, the Golden Moon Goddess every few decades appears and a member of the Vestilan line of Lios and a member of the First House of Darkfell need to go to the “Tower” and live there for 7 years without ever leaving. Normally the chosen people go through years of training to survive in the tower without any help from servants, but shortly before Candra’s sister is supposed to go to the tower she dies in a shipwreck. This leaves only Candra and her very pregnant sister as the only options to take her place. After some back and forth Candra goes to the tower to represent her family’s line. This is where she meets Nemeth, a Fellion, a monster who despite having his anatomy described, I’m not sure how it actually works with the very human furniture described in the book.
I enjoyed the overall plot idea, however, the plot ended up being put to the backburner in favor of X-rated monster ‘romance’ (aka porn). I like spicy fantasy novels, but this was way more than just ‘spicy’, and many of the X-rated scenes didn’t do much for the plot. Once it got near the end of the book, it felt like there was a rush to wrap things up rather than let it play out. There were many points near the end of the book that I WANTED to be more detailed, such as the court intrigue, the fighting, the plotting, etc (don’t want to give spoilers). There was a big reveal that I really liked, but then it wasn’t particularly fleshed out to my disappointment. Pretty much this book is 90% X-rated content and 10% actual plot.
Also, this entire book is in the present tense, which really hurt my brain trying to read it. The vast majority of books I read are in the past tense, so it took me until about halfway through the book for my mind to not just want to stop reading purely because of the present tense being used.
If you like very raunchy detailed monster romances, you might like this. If you like spicy, but also want a good balance of plot, probably not for you.
Katastrophe Chef 