Night Play by Sherrilyn Kenyon

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Unbearably clichéd and cheesy work that is focused on female self-image issues more than on anything else.
DNFed. I actually almost DNFed it after the very first chapter. But then I decided to make myself see if I’d get to any actual plot, made it about 40% in, and gave up.
After reading the Prologue, I thought it might actually be good. With the weres introduced and the dark back-story. But then in the chapter 1 we get introduced to the heroine…who is crying over an email where an abusive boyfriend who used her and treated her like shit all the time and broke up with her, and she ‘though she would marry him’. This alone could be enough to close this book forever for me. But there’s more.
Now I’m going to rant.
I’ve picked up a lot of ridiculous ‘romance’ novels by mistake recently, but nothing quite like this. I can even forgive the constant ‘insta-love’, because it often comes with the werewolf territory, but… They meet, he buys her a necklace, she cries, they have sex. (The end.) …He ‘doesn’t have an ounce of fat of his body’, she’s ‘solid size 18’; he keeps thinking how all other females he knew were aggressive and demanding bitches (literally) and how she is all so soft and kind, she keeps thinking about her ‘boyfriend’ who couldn’t stand looking at her with lights on while the main character is all over her; he is supposed to be a wolf-born shifter, who had lived his all life in a pack until 18 months ago and doesn’t even know how to date humans, and a hunted outcast without his own home and taking care of a comatose brother, but he also has a bank manager on speed dial who apparently his personal account manager, and he has his own table in the ‘super expensive’ restaurant where everyone knows him and he is ‘human enough’ to have that status in the society and throw money around; she is supposed to be spirited and independent and not take shit from anyone…while she let an abusive size-shaming shithead walk all over her for years and wanted to marry him. The 40% of this book that I did read, were so full of the worst kinds of ridiculous clichés I thought my eyes were going to pop out. These characters just don’t work. They contradict themselves constantly. And more importantly, there is something very disturbing about how both men and women are treated in this.

A shame, since I thought some ideas of the series were interesting, but this is going to be a very big NOPE for me.



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