Charlotte Kersten

A few highlights from my reading experience:

-The popular quote from this book is “Shove down weakness and strength will rise.” So PTSD = weakness and the cure is suppression…Okay. Also this is first told to Auren when she’s a young girl being sex trafficked and is apparently not fighting hard enough to get out of the situation….Okay. This notion tracks with a lot of bootstraps self-help/self-improvement garbage around these topics and it makes me a little sad that it’s been highlighted thousands of times as the powerful girlboss message here because it’s so unkind and untrue and wrong-headed about what empowerment really looks like.

-Lu agrees with Auren that it was her fault that two men were murdered by the pirates who captured them. Then she scathingly tells her that she “thought she was better than that” when Auren expresses her doubt and fear regarding her current situation of imprisonment and abuse. We love supportive, empowering female friendships…

-Slade remains an icon. When he finds out that Midas hit Auren, he goes into an apoplectic rage; only her soothing and gentle woman’s touch can calm him down enough for him to start yelling at her about it. Their first sex scene involves him repeatedly telling her what to do, ignoring her and continuing when she says she needs to stop and breathe, and telling her that there’s “no going back” and that she can’t leave the room among various other delights. I don’t care if a character is into aggressive sex or domination, but when the character in question is a child sex trafficking and abuse survivor who A) has not yet managed to escape her abuser and B) has never had consensual sex with a non-abusive partner, I’m going to go so far as to say that these things need to be discussed beforehand.

The plot is just as nonsensical as ever and the writing is unfailingly ridiculous. See you for the next book in the series!