Carved in Desire – Cheyenne Browning

1 star

While the premise of this book is interesting (a woman buys a new house with a very realistic gargoyle outside who, surprise!, comes to life at night), the execution didn’t do it for me.

There’s a lot of repetition in the writing. So much so, that I started focusing more on how many times I saw specific words like needy (22) and little (38) rather than taking in what was happening in the story. There was also a lot of cursing by the main character. Cursing in general doesn’t bother me, but this was so over-the-top that it started to become more of a hindrance than a help.

I had a really hard time figuring out how much time was passing. There was a point that Evelyn implied nearly a week had passed after the prior scene but then Valentina mentioned that the prior scene had happened the night before. It seemed like a lot of things happened “off camera” so it was hard to keep track of where the timeline was at.

I really think overall this story needed more layers. I couldn’t get a grip of Evelyn at all beyond the cursing, the constant need for stimulation, and how much she didn’t want to have to go work. I wanted to see more happening in the story rather than being mentioned as things that had happened but were skipped past in the story.

Carved in Desire was really interesting; it’s not often that you see sapphic themes in monster romance so I’m always happy to see it in stories. But the execution just wasn’t there for me.