The Reckoning by Susanne Valenti & Caroline Peckham
Hate hate hate hate hate the Darcy wolf pack storyline. Seth “accidentally” making her an Omega is ludicrous. How are you so stupid you don’t realize you’re connecting someone to your pack, especially someone who’s not even the same order as you? Plus the forced initiation. WHY does he want to keep her in the pack outside of his pull as an Alpha to protect her? Why does he think he has these feelings for her? I don’t think he’s genuinely capable of having legitimate feelings for her (or remotely understanding them if he does), especially after the way he hurt her. You can’t hurt someone like that and then expect literally anything at all of them except vitriolic hatred. Darcy is way too accommodating of his psycho pack shit.
Not me tearing up over Darius asking Sofia for help because he just loves his brother that much. Darius’s faults boil down to not being able to be the man he wants to be. Typical coming of age narrative, nothing absurd about it. He’s really not a bad guy, he’s just a traumatized child in an adults body and he needs to sort his shit out and treat everyone the way he treats his brother.
Washer makes me want to vomit and bleach my eyes. I do not care if he’s porking the principal, there are people higher than the principal. He should not be able to get away with anything that he does. One of Caleb’s many shining moments is for sure when he gets Washer to stay out of Tory’s head. If only the fully grown, adult man teaching 18-22 year olds wasn’t such a creepy pervert and understood the boundary of NOT molesting them so that the powerful Heir boyfriend to one doesn’t have to make that happen for her, that would be cool.
Xavier makes me want to cry. Tory treating him like a person should not have been what it was to him. It should have just been expected. Someone needs to put Lionel down like the dog he is *cough, Vega twins, cough*.
I love the “Wonder Twin Powers, Activate” moment we got with their Order form’s emergence. 10/10
The pacing remains good, a little bit of extra smut thrown in for fun, but it’s not detracting from the book at all. Really, almost every complaint I have is about the actual character of the characters because the authors actually did a fantastic job of making me hate the characters I’m supposed to hate, looking at YOU, Washer, and making the characters we’re supposed to love and root for very complex individuals. The magic system seems to be incredibly consistent, the social system is wayyyy too consistent because these Fae are definitely crazy but they’re predictably crazy.
However, even with the social system being what it is, there’s no way as Fae they’re supposed to just put up with shit like what Washer does. Yeah, he’s a parasitic Order and they’re supposed to “Fae Up” and fight him off to prove their worth in society and the hierarchy, but there’s a line between leaching off a students magic to fuel his own and PASSING OUT SEX TOYS IN A CLASSROOM THAT IS NOT HIS TO FEED OFF THE LUST OF FRESHMAN WHILE LITERALLY FORCING THEIR MOST INTIMATE MEMORIES TO THE SURFACE. That is beyond parasitic Order and well over the line into illegal territory in my opinion. At a school as prestigious as Zodiac Academy with the kids there whose parents have the kind of pull they do, why in hells cold pits is no one stepping in to stop him? That just irks me beyond belief.