Storm

4⭐️4🌶

This one was trippy, if I'm honest.  But the more I've sat with it the more I'm liking it and I wish I would have given it another half star.  Alot happens in this book and the last third of it went a direction I wasn't expecting to it's taken me a little to wrap my head around everything.  But overall its a great book.  It's probably not going to be for everyone with the amount of spice and the nature of the spice that's in it.  Storm is the FMC in the book.  She is 18 when the book starts and is a lightning farmer.  There are strict class designations and this is mostly a dystopian world.  She and her family sit very low on the totem pole.  She grows up with her mother and older brother telling her stories of the fae realm.  In the fae realm everyone is equal and its a utopia.  Right after she turns 19 she and her brother go into town on market day.  She is flagged for a physical and is told to report to the med bay.  She was under the impression that she didn't have any solence (basically DNA of the chosen people)  Turns out she 50% "hollow" and her brother knew and tries to hide her from the authorities.  They are both caught.  Her brother gets splayed out in the center of the market and she gets dragged away.  She assumes her brother dies at this point and their mother is as good as dead too as she's been sick for years and is bed ridden.  So Storm gets taken to Halo, the city where these "chosen" humans live and is taken to the Lord Commander so he can decide who she'll be given to for breeding.  He takes one look at her and decides to keep her for himself.  He also states he won't touch her without her permission, but he figures she'll only be able to hold out about a year.  Then there is a 12 year time jump and she has a 5 year old son.  I didn't find this too jarring but I read reviews and this seemed to be a point where many people DNFd.  That time gap gets filled in with flash backs.  It was interesting to see how she'd changed in 12 years and also how she hadn't changed in 12 years.  Now the relationship between her and her husband, Melek, was also interesting and again is not going to be everyone's cup of tea.  At the beginning of the book it is a very dom/sub relationship with quite a few BDSM elements.  I've been reading a whole BDSM series, so this was not shocking or foreign to me.  Their relationship is very spicy.  She hates Melek, but she loves what he does to her.  Melek is not like other MMCs.  It took probably 2/3 of the book for me to really like him.  So it was a slow burn in the best sense of the trope.  The relationship between Melek and their son Sunny was sweet.  The whole motherhood aspect of story was done really well and wasn't overbearing.  I don't want to go into too much detail here but the dystopian story mixed into the high fantasy story and it was a combination I don't think I've seen before.  It was very interesting, I liked the characters, I like the world and I really really liked the spice.  So, it was a yes for me.  It released yesterday on October 1st.  Go check it out.