🍎🍎🍎🍎🍎
The 8th book I read for the Love in the Night Readathon was book 1 in Larissa Ione's Demonica series, Pleasure Unbound. Like I mentioned in my tbr, I've been wanting to read this series for quite a while and Larissa has been one of my sister's favorite authors. I actually have owned the first 6 books for a while as well. When we purchased them for my sister for her birthday or Christmas one year we ended up with doubles that I got to keep. I used this book for the demon prompt on the bingo board. Another fun note, I ended up reading this on Memorial Day and when I got the end I saw that Larissa is an Air Force Veteran and her husband is in the Coast Guard. A fun coincidence!
Tayla is a demon hunter and ends up in a brutal fight. The demons actually have a secret hospital, and when their paramedics arrive to pick up one of the demons she was fighting, they pick her up as well. Here is were she meets Eidolon. He's a seminus demon, a super specialized incubus, and head of the hospital. He treats her and they both are immediately drawn to each other. I also really enjoyed that the demon's slang for the hunters are slayers or Buffys. This put me right back into my high school Buffy fandom and immediately put me in the correct mindset to read this book. This is an older book, but since I started my paranormal romance journey mostly due to Buffy it felt like going home in a way.
This universe is super cool and I loved the world building. I have read books where there are other creatures including demons, but never where the demons are so prevalent. I also have usually only seen demons as "bad" creatures and loved that this really focused on the shades of gray and that some demons could be good. I really enjoyed the mystery aspect to the story and the twists that kept coming. I also found it interesting that demons go through evolutions and the different powers they all have. We also do meet a werewolf which is fun. There are quite a few characters that I'd love to see get a HEA, mainly Gem and Luc. I know the next couple books are about Eidolon's brothers, which is super fun.
This book had some great steamy moments and I feel the action scenes were written really well. My only gripe would be how much Tayla pushed back against the truths she was learning, but I also understood that she has been brainwashed and had a lot of biases formed that need to be broken. I also didn't like that she wasn't as open with Eidolon about her trauma for so long, especially when there were quite a few times where it would've felt more natural. I still loved the twisty turns the intense feelings between Tayla and Eidolon. There was also a little bit of a stereotypical 3rd act conflict that seemed a little unnecessary, but I feel like it fit the time of publishing so it didn't bother me too much. I'm excited to continue the series and will have to try to work in maybe a novel a month. There are a couple spin-offs from the original series, but they are included in the Demonica list which has the 20th book coming out this year as well as the novellas. Another long series I'm committing myself to, but I'm excited for it since it's so unique from my other long running paranormal series.
Have you read Pleasure Unbound?
Bookishly Yours,
Stasi🍎
STATISTICS: Pleasure Unbound, Larissa Ione, 5-stars, 1 day, paperback, 389 pages, published in 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment