I have no say that this was my favorite read of 2018. God what does that say about me this was such a dark read. After I finished Block Party I needed more from this author so I picked this up I had the first 30% done that same night. Enough about me now on to Church and Emma.
Church is twisted, this story takes you thru many emotions, you feel pity, rage, pain you even start to feel obsessed, it leaves you raw.

Paul “ Church” and Emma’s characters are so multifaceted, is hard to really know what is next, what are they thinking. They are two broken people with so much hate, resentment and pain that when they meet each other is clearly that they are each other’s missing pieces that where lost along the way. The wicked chemistry between the two is flawless and I loved every page. Thank you for giving me Margo to hate because I think this book needed someone to hate and Margo was the perfect villain. There is so much I want to say but won't I have no desire to ruin the story, so I suggest picking it up and inhaling it with lots of water because this one is an emotional hang over.

batman x riddler fanfic



listen..... i was hoping for more from this. and i think the proof of that is i'm starting this review and i'm not even finished yet.

mostly, i think there should have been much, MUCH, more slow burn. if emma is so fucked up, show us baby!! show us how she grows to be so obsessed with church, show us her stalking him, how she loses weight, her falling behind in school, her fights getting nastier with her mom, etc. have it be dragged out, make it agonizing!!! i don't just want to see her *worship* church, i want her to have WORK to even be ABLE to worship him.

as far as church goes, he reminds me of the kid from the killing of a sacred deer; an allegory for god. an unassuming, bizarre kid who wants to be worshipped, who wants people to suffer to please him. at least that's what i gather the author WANTS church to be like, and so far i don't think she's doing enough to push that narrative. show the father being scared of his own son, margo hushing when church comes into a room, have the students be more divided. are they scared of him, do they look up to him, do they HATE him? i also think there needs to be MORE mystery surrounding his departure from columbia. more, more, more. there's some mystery and there's some thrill but i think every emotion needs to be amped up like 10 degrees.

as far as his big secret goes, i just don't find it that interesting? like i was expecting him to go full riddler and have a secret laboratory where he's been making bombs to play around the city. not just him stalking this perfectly quiet, normal girl because he wants to skin her like a deer. like emma said, it feels like bullying and it feels pointless. yawwwwwn.

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okay, i finished pretty quickly after my mid-read review. my feelings pretty must stay the same. things picked up a little towards the end. i liked the twist of the girl being his half sister, and i'm glad that church turned out to have more of a conscience than i thought. emma though........ i just don't really feel much towards her. it's pretty mean to say but i don't really sympathize with her trauma much? i think there just isn't much to go off of, we know that men have fucked her up, and her mom too, but like.... give us some more specifics maybe? she's got some serious mental health issues, and i feel like that's sort of glossed over in a very blasé way.

anddddd as far as sex goes i straight up don't remember any scenes except the office at the end, and the part when he handcuffed her in his room for a whole day. the office scene was pretty tame for what this book should've been giving, the handcuff scene was pretty good! there should have been more like that; church testing emma in cruel, base ways but like sexily ( )

Dayum. Just... dayum. This book was just... yeah. I'm not entirely sure how I feel after reading it. I'm pretty sure I'm partly traumatized by Church and Emma, and yet I can't wait to read the next book because I need to have more of their story.

This story doesn't seem like it's going to be all that dark at the beginning, but trust me, looks can be and are deceiving. Stylo Fantome didn't just write a book that was dark, she wrote one that rolled around in the dark, picked up pieces of darkness to throw like confetti, and explored obsession.

There is very little healthy at all in this book. Emma and Church are both severely broken. I think they would be broken no matter what, but their respective histories practically guarantee that they are profoundly broken. Normally I love it when a broken person finds the person who fits their broken pieces and fits them together, but that doesn't always happen. ( )

4.6 stars

This author... Sweet holy titfire. She can push the envelope of limits. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this series. Going in blind is always the best when starting her books.

I don't know what I can say without giving away the story. It was intense, it was haunting, and it was disturbing. Just how I like it. ( )