Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

By Ali Hazelwood

Thank you, Berkley Romance for the free book!

Switching genres is always tricky for an author. Ali Hazelwood has cornered the market on intelligent, STEM-based romances, and I’m pleased to say that her foray into fantasy with Bride is an absolute success. She has created refreshing, smart, complex characters in a new spin on the supernatural world.

Misery Lark has spent her life being the pawn of her father, one of the most powerful vampyre councilmen in the region. Finally escaping her father’s control after a decade of serving as collateral in a bargain with the humans, she chooses to remain in the human world with her human best friend, Serena, rather than return to the Vampyres. Still, she doesn’t truly feel a part of either world. When her father approaches her with a new “request” to serve as the bride in a vampyre/werewolf marriage alliance, she thinks it is ludicrous but ultimately agrees upon learning the groom will be Alpha wolf Lowe, for reasons unknown to her father. The bride and groom meet for the first time during their marriage of (in)convenience ceremony and her new husband is equally unenthusiastic about the situation. Misery is taken to werewolf territory to live out a year-long commitment as Lowe’s wife and quickly discovers that Lowe, and werewolves generally, are not at all what she expected as she embarks on her secret agenda.

This was one of those books where the closer I got to the final pages, the less I wanted it to end because I would miss the world and characters Hazelwood had created. The mystery, action, and politics gave weight and purpose to the story and, like Hazelwood’s STEM-themed books, Bride is smart and complex while also being a spicy, smoldering, slow-burn romance.