Book Review: Wild Love by Elsie Silver
Rating: 2 stars of 5
This is the first Elsie Silver book I’ve read. I picked it up after hearing another reader talking about how much they had enjoyed it, so I figured I’d give it a go. Unfortunately, I just don’t think this author’s style is for me (not in this book, anyway; I can’t speak to any of her others).
I kind of hated the FMC and the MMC, and I didn’t like the way Silver wrote either the romantic relationship or the spice, so the book didn’t end up working for me.
One of my biggest pet peeves in novels of this genre is authors romanticizing toxic, abusive, inauthentic, or otherwise unhealthy relationship dynamics. That happens a lot in this story, and I found myself wishing the characters would just grow up and act like adults in an adult relationship.
My romantic preferences aside, if the book had gone through another round of editing, it could have been better. Some of the things I found distracting would have been easily addressed. For example (aside from the occasional grammatical error):
The author likes to use unnecessary ellipses. They aren’t on every page or anything, but they show up in clusters here and there and pull the reader out of the story. On page 89, for example, there are three.
There is a scene that introduces a side character who never shows up again. The dialogue in this scene felt stilted and unrealistic. The whole scene could have been cut without the reader missing anything.
On page 235, a character says that another character didn’t answer a question they had asked, but said character had answered the question on page 116.
I didn’t completely hate the book, hence the two star rating. There were some quotes that I liked, and I thought Cora’s character was great. Overall, though, I’ve decided not to buy any more of Elsie’s books without first checking them out from the library to see if this was a one-off experience for me or if this style is consistent with the rest of her novels.
Content advisory: strong language, open door romance
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