Book Minx

Most of my ire with this book can be summed up in two words; Virginity Curse.

Anya is our cursed heroine. She was the deus ex machina of the previous book in the series, Darkest Night. There was so much wrong with the whole virginity curse plot that I'm not sure where to start. The details of the curse are that the first guy who penetrates Anya gets total and utter control over her. So Anya is a virgin who everybody believes is a slut and they make sure to slut-shame her frequently. At this point, Showalter is just digging herself a huge hole because, due to past experiences with her writing, I'm not seeing her handling this situation correctly.

One of the people who jumps on the slut-shaming train is the hero, Lucien. In fact, he spends 90% of the story insulting Anya or ignoring her. When he realizes that Anya doesn't "deserve"  the mistreatment, he feels guilty and apologizes to her. Okay, seriously. Virgin or not, no one deserves to be treated the way Lucien treated Anya.He should've been apologizing to her because he acted like an asshole. Not just because he felt guilty that he had been calling the virgin a slut. The kind of mentality found in this book surrounding the status of Anya's past sexual experiences was abhorrent.

The somewhat sad thing is that I expected to like Lucien. He was the calm and collected leader of the group in the first book. But Lucien came off as a whiny bastard in this story. When he’s not insulting or trying to kill Anya, he’s whining about how she couldn’t possibly find him attractive due to his scars. I think this was supposed to make me feel sympathy for the character and show how tortured he is, but it didn't. Instead, it made him feel like an high school boy who is angry because he thinks the popular girl doesn't like him and so takes it out on her. But Anya does like him and the whole time he's feeling sorry for himself or insulting her, she's dressing up like his own personal sex fantasy trying to convince him to love her. The whole set-up was just plain disturbing.  

What kept me reading was the side characters, most of them were entertaining enough to help me get through the book. While I don't plan on reading any of the other installments in this series, I might be convinced to read Disease's story (if Showalter ever gives him one).