A Soul to Keep

 

5 ★ 3🌶

I finished A Soul to Keep by Opal Reyne last night.  This was my first foray into Monster Romance, so I don't really have anything else to compare it to.  It was pretty spicey.  I waffled between giving it another pepper.  The scenes are quite descriptive, long and there is a good amount of it.  Overall the book was good.  The story was interesting, there was a ton of world building.  The FMC is an outcast in her village, so when it's time to choose the next sacrifice for the Duskwalker who comes to collect once every decade she's the obvious choice.  Her choices are go with this Duskwalker willingly or spend the rest of her life in the underground cell in the village.  She chooses the Duskwalker.  Duskwalkers are a type of demon, but who can be out in daylight.  They are attracted to the smell of fear; it makes them go into a frenzy and they eat humans.  Luckily for Reia, she fears very little.  The Duskwalker chooses her and takes her back to his home in the Veil.  The Veil is a part of Earth that appeared from another realm and is where the demons reside.  All humans who venture into the Veil never return.  Reia soon learns the Orpheus is looking for a companion and is really lonely, a feeling Reia is all too familiar with as she lived alone within her village and was persecuted because she was the only member of her family to survive a demon attack when she was a small child.  A friendship begins to form between Orpheus and Reia.  As much as she wants freedom she very quickly realizes that abandoning Orpheus would hurt him in immeasurable ways and much to her own dismay, she realizes she can't do that to him.  Obviously this relationship becomes more than a friendship pretty quickly.  That gets pretty umm interesting from a logistics standpoint.  I do appreciate that magic was involved to make everything fit, because I have a hard time wrapping my head around the alternative.  There are outside forces that try to tear them apart, not just the demons at their literal doorstep that will eat Reia at the first opportunity.  There is a whole hierarchy situation among the demons and a "bad guy" is revealed late in the book.  The struggle is intense and this book broke me in all the right ways.  Orpheus is such a cinnamon roll or more of an overgrown puppy; so many things he said to Reia made me saw awwww out loud.  Reia is smart, spunky and a little irreverent, which I find fun.  There is a good amount of banter and humor in this book  There are seven more books in this series.  I'll read more of them at some point but I'm going to break it up with other reads in between.  As much as I liked this book, I don't think I could do a marathon of the series.

    

    As soon as I finished this book I immediately started another that's been on my TBR for a long time.  Guarded Treasure by Mae Lorette is a retelling of the 1999 cinematic masterpiece The Mummy starting Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiss, which is one of my all time favorite movies.  So I have a ton of expectations going into this book.  I read the first chapter last night and I can hear Rick and Evie's voices in my head.  The set up in the first chapter was good.  We'll see how the rest goes.  I did look at reviews on Storygraph, they were extremely mixed.  It looked as though people who read it strictly because of The Mummy movie were happy with it, and that's what I'm reading it for so I have good feelings about it.  I've also realized I'm not that critical, I've been giving a lot of my reads 5 stars regardless of flaws.  I guess I'm a mood reader who's here for the vibes and all these books have been tickling whatever part of my brain that needs it.  That's it for me right now.  Back to Egypt and this supposed cursed tomb.  Happy reading.

-Q