REVIEW | Angry God by L.J. Shen

Title: Angry God (All Saints High Book 3)
Author: L.J. Shen
Release Date: February 18, 2020
★★★** Kindle Unlimited

Vaughn Spencer.
They call him an angry god.
To me, he is nothing but a heartless prince.
His parents rule this town, its police, every citizen and boutique on Main Street.
All I own is a nice, juicy grudge against him for that time he almost killed me.
Between hooking up with a different girl every weekend, breaking hearts, noses and rules, Vaughn also finds the time to bully little ole’ me.
I fight back, tooth and nail, never expecting him to chase me across the ocean after we graduate high school.
But here he is, living with me in a dark, looming castle on the outskirts of London.
A fellow intern. A prodigal sculptor. A bloody genius.
They say this place is haunted, and it is.
Carlisle Castle hides two of our most awful secrets.
Vaughn thinks he can kill the ghosts of his past, but what he doesn’t know? It’s my heart he’s slaying.

Hooooo boy! I feel like this is going to be a seriously polarizing book. When I really look at the content of this book, the behavior of the characters, and the overall arc of the story, I can definitely see where people are going to love it while other people absolutely hate it. Personally, I'm a little bit in both camps, I must admit. There are things that I really, really loved and appreciated about this book and others that sort of fell flat for me.

Coming away from this book, I was reminded really about what I really like in a dark romance after falling down a  bit of a rabbit hole of things that I don't like at all in this genre. While this is definitely dark and contains themes and story elements that straight up need a trigger warning (see the end of the review for that) I think it also maintains a consistency of characterization and a realism of consequences that I think is really, really well done. There's a bit of suspension of disbelief, I think, that's required when it comes to dark romance and I think everyone is going to have a slightly different hard line when it comes to how far they're willing to suspend, but this one actually hit at a really solid place for me and didn't push me too far. Honestly, lately I've been accidentally ending up in books where I feel downright dirty and uncomfortable at the end, and this didn't do that for me. 

I must say, Lenora wasn't my favorite heroine ever, but I did actually really appreciate that her characterization held some darkness that made the pairing of her with Vaughn make sense. Personally, I'm kind of sick of books where Mary-Sue-I'm-So-Sweet gets paired up against Captain-Psycho-McHurtYouPants. I often feel, with those types of pairings, that I'm more being told that there's this incredible chemistry and desire there rather than being shown it, which is where so many romance novels fail for me. In this book, I felt like the combination of shared history and intensity with that sort of dark-calling-dark element made it make more sense that these characters would be drawn to each other. Ultimately, I think she could have been more fleshed out, more crafted, and she would have been an incredible character, but as it is I feel like she was fine. 

Vaughn was... Admittedly, I'm still kind of figuring out how I felt about Vaughn. Often, in my favorite romances, I find the hero swoony, but that really wasn't the case here. I found the ways that Vaughn was broken and how he expressed that to be really more fascinating than attractive. Sometimes he was so vicious and so angry and hateful that it felt like he was almost a caricature, but other times when you saw his insecurity and uncertainty he felt like a little boy, and I really did like that duality there. I think that both of those aspects of him were related to each other and ultimately made them both make sense. Honestly, considering his circumstances and where his darkness came from, this felt really well thought out for me and made me enjoy him as a character even if I didn't swoon.

When it comes to the story arc, I don't think there's anything groundbreaking here and I will admit that it ended up being a little bit predictable - none of the motivations really surprised me, but ultimately I didn't personally mind that. There's also what I guess is supposed to be a secret from Vaughn's past that really wasn't a twist or a surprise at all, it was pretty obvious and I had the assumption through to entire book that what happened was what happened. Something that I did feel a little bit let down by in this book was the pacing, which to me felt like it dragged when it could have moved a little more quickly and then really rushed in places that I think needed some more building and care to get to a satisfying end. 

As has been driving me crazy lately, this ends on a Happily Ever Epilogue that I found both boring and predictable, but this time it was actually made more frustrating for me than usual. There's something I've been wishing I would see at the end of a romance novel that it genuinely seemed like she was going to do, like I straight up had a moment of "Finally!" and then... nope. Happily ever epilogue, married way too young and OOP TWINS. Yeah. YEAH. Honestly, the HEE is something that I generally hate, but I tend to give authors a pass because I know that there are a lot of people who want it and it's super subjective, but this one almost felt like an affront to me because it started to go a slightly different way, a way I have been personally waiting for and one that I think would have really made sense for these characters, and then SHARPLEFTINTOGENERICVILLE. Also, I feel like there's something so absolutely dull about going through a super twisted dark romance and then... DON'T WORRY GUYS, THERE'S DEFINITELY RINGS AND BABIES AND A PICKET FENCE. 

I think, before I started writing this review, I thought that I was overall happier with this book than I am now that I've really gone through it in my head. It's a 3 star for me, pretty solidly, in that I generally enjoyed the read, I felt engaged, but there are definitely some aspects that just didn't get there for me.

TRIGGER WARNING: Childhood sexual abuse (explicit and on the page)