Fury Bound is not bad, but it's not great. It's not the new holy grail of romantasy. It's ... alright. It certainly does not deserve all the 5* reviews it has gotten so far.

The saving grace of this book, is the deepening relationship between Meryn and Anassa. For me, that's the true heart of this book. The back and forth attraction between Meryn and Stark got slapped with a big fat miscommunication trope-sticker. I loathe that trope, burn it to the ground. What we ultimately end up with (so far) is just... "meh" and honestly not very believable as far as feelings/attraction go. I feel like I have read both the romance and the plot of this book a million times, just in different fonts.

That being said; I will be finishing the series, and the last book will be a make-or-break for me. The lore and world-building is not original by any means, but interesting enough that I'm invested and want to see this through to the end.

You just can’t make this shit up—or so I thought.

There are four love interests and they are named as follows: (1) A dragon shifter called Baelfire Decimus (2) A blood fae called Silas Crane (3) A leather-clad ‘Nightmare Prince’ incubus called Crypt DeLune (4) An ice elemental called Everett Frost

Me and my friends, all putting our heads together in the name of satire, could not have come up with more perfectly comical Wattpad-slop names for a cast of characters. (Speaking from direct experience here. This is an exercise we have undergone, and what we came up with ironically could not beat this author’s earnest work.)

dramatized recreation of the aforementioned exercise

All of these aptly named caricatures men are panting relentlessly after one girl: Maven. She is the personification of Wednesday Addams. I’m not drawing an illustrative comparison here; she is obviously just an aged-up Wednesday Addams. She wears all-black frumpy clothes, she takes long walks in graveyards, she loves dead flowers that look like skulls. One of her boyfriends even calls her spooky and kooky. It’s an intentional ripoff.

The fact that the original Wednesday Addams is, crucially, a small child—adult-ified in this erotica series…yeah, it’s uncomfortable. Bad vibes.

Essentially, this series is low-brow entertainment for anyone who needs a male validation quick-fix. Easy to see why it’s popular. I had a good time and probably will continue with the series.

The writing style is genuinely clever and witty. Maven has some zinger one-liners. Morgan B Lee is skilled at bringing out each character’s voice, which can be a challenge in multi-POV first-person narration, especially when you’re working with characters that are flat archetypes.