✨ ARC Review - Shadowed Lover by Lauren Dawes ✨

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Title: Shadowed Lover (Blood Bound, #1)

Author: Lauren Dawes

Genre: Adult Paranormal (Shifters)

Rating: ☕️☕️☕️ 3.8

Release Date: May 11'th 

Page Length: 412

Blurb: 

Loyalties will be tested.

Brooding leader of the Revenant, Drake is still haunted by the loss of his twin sister over a decade ago. Tasked with investigating a string of female kidnappings in the jaguar shifter world, he’s also asked to protect the Leo’s only daughter, who turns out to be a lot more than he bargained for.

Betrayals will be revealed.

Headstrong daughter of the pride’s Leo, Neve wants more from life than to be mated and produce the next generation of shifters. When her cousin mysteriously disappears, Neve knows she’s become the latest victim of the rash of abductions. Willing to do anything to save her, she demands that her Shadow-turned-babysitter allows her to tag along on his investigation.

Delving deeper into the mystery together, will they be able to ignore the building attraction between them, or will their mate bond prove to be too strong? 

*Trigger Warning*

This book contains scenes that depict sexual assault, which may be a trigger for some readers.

Review:

This review is definitely going to be a little more critical than I usually write. I know I usually focus on my feelings about the book in my reviews. And these are still just my feelings and opinions, but there are some things I wanted to touch on to explain my rating for this book. 

I'm going to start off with saying that for the most part, I did enjoy Shadowed Lover. I liked the writing, and most of the characters. But from the synopsis I got the impression that it would just be our two main characters point on view, but we get a few characters pov's and this just kind of drove me crazy. It was very off putting in the beginning of the story. 

I enjoyed Neve and Drakes chapters the most, and when it came to them I found myself really into the story. But as soon as one of their chapters would end and we got another characters pov, I would lose interest and it would take a minute to get back into the story. Multiple point of views is just not my thing, and I really wish I has known about it before going into this book. 

There was one character in particular that we get chapters from that I honestly don't know what the point was. I found myself wanting to skim over their pov every time. It still didn't make sense by the end of the book. They really didn't have any importance to the story in this first book. Maybe they will later on, but I would have enjoyed it more without their chapters. 

The other two characters we get get chapters from, I don't want to spoil anything so I won't say who, I can understand one of them. It was important to the story, but the other one honestly felt like maybe that character should have had their own book, instead of chapters in this one. They felt more like a main character to me and that just didn't jell very well with it being Neve and Drake's story. I enjoyed both of these characters chapters, but the one that felt like it should have its own book, was still distracting from the main story to me.

Like I said, I did really like this book. I really liked Lauren's writing. In Neve and Drakes chapters, I was captivated and on the edge of my seat. I found myself really getting into the book when it came to them. I would have enjoyed this book so much more if it had just been the two main characters. 

There is still much to be answered in the future books, and Shadowed Lover definitely caught my interest enough that I will most likely continue reading this series. 

Overall I liked the writing, the story and the plot, and Neve and Drake. I am interested to see how certain things will play out in the future books. It was a great start to the series, I just wish it had been focused on our main characters instead of a little bit of everyone. 

*ARC received in exchange for an honest review. All opinions and thoughts are my own.* 

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- Danielle