Squeak: A Twisted Tale, Vera Valentine

GoodReads Rating: 3.18 ⭐️

My Rating: 🌕🌕🌗 (2.5 stars)

Spice: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

On Kindle Unlimited?: Yes

Kindle E-book: $0.99

Audiobook: $5.95

Paperback: $7.99

Length: 54 pages

I could have chosen to read a different book after my chemistry exam. But, seeing as it was my birthday earlier this month, I thought it appropriate to read a book about balloons.

Well, okay, not balloons exactly. Sebastian and Keane are actually balloon-animal shifters. And they are desperate need of an artist if they want to keep their recently gained autonomy and truly be free.

When Poppy, an art student at the local community college, visits the zoo where Sebastian and Keane work, Sebastian is thrilled. He likes Poppy, and seeing a little of her work in the figure drawings of zoo patrons, he believes she can help them.

Keane is less than enthusiastic. He hates the way Poppy looks at Sebastian, and the way her blue eyes stick around in his memory.

But, as the three are tied closer and closer together, they’ll find themselves knotted to each other…in more ways than one.

I had every intention to give this story a higher rating. The concept for the story was interesting: it’s not every day you read about balloon animal shifters. And the spice, when we actually experience it, is competently written and charged with chemistry. However, the story falls flat in several places by falling victim to a writer’s greatest adversary and ally: Exposition.

In some cases, the exposition works. When Sebastian and Keane “tell us” about their creation, their creator, and her SAing them prior to the start of the start of the story, it works to set up the stakes and tell us what these two mean to each other before we really get going. And, since the past SA is told in exposition, it isn’t detailed, which could allow for more people to read the book, if they are okay with less detailed descriptions of the boys’ SA.

But when that exposition is also used to tell us about most of Poppy’s heat (this is an omegaverse book, remember), most of the M/M/F spice, the second bonding in the three-way relationship, and the *final confrontation* with the antagonist that the story has been building up since the start, it gets old, fast.

I was confused and a fair bit disappointed in this book. It has a strong concept and a *very good* spice scene between Poppy and Keane, but after that, the story turns into an exposition dump that delivers us at a “happy ending” that feels unearned.

If this feels like something you would want to read, remember: this book does contain themes of an abusive F/M/M relationship that ended prior to the beginning of the book. The SA is not described in graphic detail, and we never experience it from the character’s point of view, but if any themes of SA bother you at all, sit this one out.

#kindleunlimited #kindleunlimitedromance #monsterromance #bookwormsoflemon8