#avareid

Rating: 4/5

Book Blurb:

The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.

Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.

When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother she might stand a chance of staying alive.

For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.

As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.

And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love. 

Review:

A gorgeous dystopian sapphic romance with a touch of Hunger Games. In a world where the the poor can clear some of their debts by selling someone into the televised hunting game show called the Gauntlet, created by an evil corporation known as Caerus, where they are marked as "lambs" and hunted for 12 days by "Angels", girls who have been modified to be killers, one girl finds herself completely thrown into chaos when her mother sacrifices her. All Inesa has ever done was try to survive, by day she works as a taxidermist who creates beautiful taxidermy from the animals that her twin brother hunts and sells it to the wealthy class by night she returns home to her home in a half-sunken town where her mother spends her days wasting their money and putting Inesa down. Inesa's mother's latest act of cruelty is to put Inesa into the Gauntlet... and now inesa has 12 hours to get ready before the hunt begins. Melinoë is an Angel, a girl who was sold by her parents as a child and the altered through many procedures to become part machine but fully one of the best most merciless killers of the Game. Melinoë has a problem though, her last kill haunts her, no matter how many times she tries to get her memory wiped of it... its stuck on a loop in her head and she hasn't been the same since. Her handler assigns her to the newest game and it is her chance to make it up or else she will be decommissioned and wiped to become an empty husk and sold off to become the wife of some politician with her entire mind being empty. Melinoë wants nothing more than to win the game but things take a turn when the moment the game begins she begins to get more flashbacks and when monstrous creatures attack both Melinoë and Inesa in the woods, they have to team up to survive.... but can they trust each other long enough to survive the deadly creatures outside the woods or the society that is bent on twisting them into something neither girl wants to be. A soft romance built on survival, on finding someone who sees you for your worth, and in the midst of chaos is born through this story. I had so much fun with this story and need a whole second book because the way this ends is just too heartwrenching, too sad, for everything that they go through and everything that is done... please I am begging send me some kind of extra epilogue because I don't want Melinoë to suffer more. I have always been a fan of the way Ava Reid writes and the way she builds her romances and worlds is just so beautiful. The story is just so compelling and the world building was fantastic. I love the way Ava writes enemies-to-lovers and this was just so good!

Release Date: March 4, 2025

Publication/Blog: Ash and Books (ash-and-books.tumblr.com)

Tour : https://tbrandbeyondtours.com/

Author info:

Website:https://avasreid.tumblr.com/about

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/avasreid

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