Ill-Fated Mate: eARC Review
Friends! I am excited to be here today sharing my advance review of Jordan Monroe’s steamy monster romance: Ill-Fated Mate, Book 1 in her new Old Gods interconnected romance series. I happily stumbled upon Jordan and her work via Twitter after she tweeted a gif of *that* giant obsidian winged monster from Disney’s Fantasia, asking romancelandia: did you see him and wish he got his own HEA? Well folks, I did and I got my grabby little hands on an eARC and I’m here to tell you all the things I loved about this delight of a monster romance.
As always big thanks to Jordan Monroe for the ARC, thoughts below are my own, enjoy.
Look, before I get into it, I just want to say, that we are living in a renaissance of monster romance stories. From C.M. Nacosta, to Lillian Lark, to Katee Robert and R.M. Virtues we are being SPOILED for monsters getting their hard won HEA’s. Well let’s all go ahead and add Jordan Monroe to this club shall we?
Alright with that out of the way, I will get to get to it.
Ill-Fated Mate, is the story of a millennia old winged god of ill-fate Zerne and a folklore scholar human woman Diana. This starts out via our god Zerne playing fast and loose with a goddess, who takes none too kindly to being trifled with. From there she curses our guy, to a life of solitude, trapped forever in his cave, until his soul’s mate comes to rescue him. So RIGHT away I was living for this very beauty and the beast-ness of it all. The vibes at this point are immaculate.
Flash-forward many millennia, Diana is grieving both the death of her mother AND finding out her shit-bag of a fiancée has been cheating on her. Her group of fellow uncanny case workers, let her know her name for some reason, some how just turned up outside a cave in Germany. Pretty soon she’s off to Germany to investigate.
I loved the “meet-cute” these two have, including Diana’s gentle-victorian-woman-swoon. There was such an ease in which these two connect, but it’s in how Monroe writes these two that really makes this love story shine. The steam, both literal (he made a spa for her) and figurative (hooking up in said spa) will have fans of the genre feeling all sorts of delicious things. Oh wait, record scratch I forgot to tell you, our man Zerne is a VIRGIN y’all. So you can imagine the absolute screeching I did, not only reading his inner-monologue, but watching our gal Diana find her own voice in asking for what she wants.
From there, we get to sit back and watch two beings, fall-in-love with each other.
This book is the perfect blend of sweet, spicy, and soulful. With a story built around lore, with excellent world-building, that draws you in right from the first page. This is a high-heat, fated mates monster romance that folks are going to love. Now I’m looking forward to book 2 👀, I need it now!
Perfect for fans of C.M. Nacosta, R.M. Virtues, and Lillian Lark Ill-Fated Mate is sure to delight fans of winged monsters everywhere. Grab your copy wherever you get your books, when it hits stores June 14th 2022.