Review: The Tyrant Alpha's Rejected Mate by Cate C. Wells
I am clearly not doing a good job at knowing what romance I will actually like. Hopefully, this issue will alleviate with time, I am so good at choosing books I am going to love in most other genres, but I still lack that ability here.
This is not going to be a well-formatted review in any way. I heard about this book on a podcast. It sounded bananas in a fun fanfiction way. I did not end up liking it.
I thought the disability representation was questionable at best but was probably more harmful than positive overall.
This book massively suffers from trying to create a society that is more misogynistic than our own in order to overthrow the patriarchy (which they do pretty swiftly). The social strata made almost zero sense when I paused to try to parse this in my mind. Also, I personally hate it when women are cartoonishly oppressed, and we are largely shown that women are fine with their society. This book has that in spades.
So much of this book seemed like the author was trying to make a social statement but maybe doesn't actually have a well-thought-out way to actually make that statement. It seemed like a contradictory mess.
This is a romance; I actively did not root for the couple to end up together, which is a pretty clear sign that it has not worked for me at all. I have very little understanding of why these two like each other at all.
I absolutely should have DNFed this book; I mostly didn't because I couldn't sleep, so I made it about 80% through this book because I didn't want to start anything else. I finished it this morning because I knew I could read it quickly. I also just generally haven't loved much I have read from KU, I already canceled my membership, but this was a last hurrah that did not go well for me.
The worldbuilding made basically zero sense to me. I was presented with so much conflicting information that I eventually just had to try to stop processing world information because it was going to drive me bananas.
I gave this book one star.
