Photo credits: Ryan Franco
Edited by Vaishali
Title: 'Monster'
Author: Jessica Gadziala Series: (Savages #1) Genre: Adult fiction, Dark Contemporary Romance, New Adult, Romantic Suspense Year of Publication: 2015 Version: ebook -kindle app Review...
‘But life was shit. Life was pain and sacrifice and disappointment. It wasn’t a test to pass or fail. It was a swirling mass of time where the lucky few knew a little happiness, but most lived in fear and pain and emptiness.’
‘I didn’t get the chance to see the sun. Because I lived in the f****** gutters.’
Set in the Navesink Bank universe, ‘Monster’ is the first book in the ‘Savages’ series. This is my first time reading a Jessica Gadziala novel, and netted by the first page ‘Monster’ certainly puts a twist on the contemporary romance genre, and I knew I was diving deep into a dark story.
‘Some people needed to wade in the muck so that others could live untouched by it.’
Alex Miller is a melancholy computer hacker who has dedicated her life from the age of sixteen to taking down one of the city’s most wretched and sociopathic street bosses: Lex Keith. For 10 years Alex has been working to discern her enemy - likes, whereabouts, habits - so she can ruin him for a life he took from her. One night – a night Alex saw coming ever since she began this pursuit – she is held at gunpoint and taken captive by Bryan Breaker, a non-aligned enforcer noted for his unsparing methods and cold-blooded attitude.
“You kidnap and hold people hostage and probably kill them. And I’m Dark?
“Yeah, doll. You’re dark. I work in darkness. I don’t live it.”
Breaker’s reputation displaces who he is though, because as a man who crosses gory limits of violence, Breaker does have a sense of moral responsibility and a discernible conscious that shows itself at first instance. Breaker is a brutal breaker of men, violence expected in the kind of world he lives in, but he has a rule that he has never broken: to never harm women and families. But when his close friend is taken hostage by Lex himself, forcing Breaker to break his own rules, he has to decide whether his conscious will allow him to make said choices.
‘Alex Miller wasn’t just the hollow eyed, determined hacker with a vendetta whose soul spoke in a language of tears. She was funny and sweet and had a strong tendency to stick her foot in her mouth and then blush like hell because of it.’
Getting to know Alex is a new experience for Breaker. Intrigued by her fiery moods but unnerved by her grim hollowness, Breaker wants to understand why Alex is so prepared for death when she has a life to live for. But Alex on the other hand doesn’t have anything to live for which is why the prospect of her oncoming death is easy to swallow. Why worry when a broken life will be missed by no-one? With a fatalistic view of her life and self, and a bleak realist’s view of the way things are Alex understands one thing: her life is empty without retaliation.
‘If, by some miracle, we both lived through the night, I intended to figure out what was wrong with her. What kind of life she had led to make her so collected in the face of her own death?’
Alex traverses some dark places in her mind, her internal chatter dolefully blunt with the acceptance of a grim life and the consequences of leading it, whereas Breaker still gives his callous life with some meaning and an appreciation in his own way. Alex’s and Breaker’s character profiles are strong and well done, credible, so much so that I was at times lost in their stories, feeling the intensity of their circumstances and Alex’s own feelings…which had my own heart hurting to see how much she had.
‘She didn’t flinch away from my dark or try to shine a light into it. Because she was living in the same depths as I was.’
“…I wanted to drag you out and show you what life is like outside that fortress you live in."
Alex’s character is made to be strong and hardy; she has no romanticism about her fate or the world because fantasy has no place alongside the life she has lived. Breaker is bossy and dominant but sweet and considerate, and I love how they both clash and argue, the moments of intimacy and heat between them, and what comes of their relationship in these sobering circumstances.
“I’m…normal?” he asked sounding insulted, turning to me with an oven glove in his hand and I felt myself laughing.
“Oh, sorry,” I drawled, still laughing. “You’re truly terrifying standing in your kitchen with an oven mitt and a wooden spoon. I’m shaking."
As one can guess, Breaker and Alex fall into a steam-fest of a relationship, attracting and desiring, and they have little reservations about getting straight to business when Breaker knows what he wants and Alex has nothing to lose. Soon – and quite quickly – they know where their loyalties sit as they wonder how they will save themselves from a despicable crime lord while helping each other. Breaker places himself at risk, doing so the moment he offers safety to Alex.
“What? I asked, fighting a smile.
She fought to control her laugh, lost, and shrugged a shoulder. “I could see a lot of people wanting to kill you is all,” she said, smiling wider.’
Alex never gave precious cost to her life, but just by being around Breaker she learns otherwise. Alex learns that there is more to her misguided life than living a solitary life’s worth of cold grief and hot anger, and a hollow acceptance of what’s to come when harrows come to pass.
‘We loved with a love that was half-possession and half never wanting to tame the wildness in the other.’
“No one is left to care about me,”… But his arms squeezed me tight. “That’s not true,” he said with certainty.’
‘Monster’ did have its shortcomings in the form of character verdicts that didn’t make sense, grammar that could use some polish, and perhaps situations that could have used more exploration. Lex (the enemy), for example, orders meetings with Alex and Breaker for no apparent reason only to offer them more time and scare them a bit more before he actually wants Alex. This doesn’t line up with type of man that he is, he could quite easily take Alex and do what he wants, so I don’t understand why he places her in Breaker’s care. As well as that, Alex and Breaker plan to make plans to save themselves from this hazard of a situation, but they don’t actually make plans except sating their desire and becoming more comfortable with each other.
“What if I can’t give you more?”
“You can,” he said simply…
Aside from that, Jessica Gadziala surely knows what she is doing with her characters, knows how to write them interestingly enough to give them strong footing and clear-cut personalities. Though ‘Monster’ is a contemporary romance, it’s dark, it’s gritty, it’s grim, and its sonorous with flagrant heat and open-ended tension. As I laid curious eyes on the first page of this story, I knew this was going to be a dark story, and it was, pulling me down with the dreadful, but following with the hope that Alex finds a reason to give her life some sustenance.
‘I got only a small view of his lifestyle.
But I feel like I got a full view of him. As a person.’
With new grounds forming for both Alex and Breaker, Jessica Gadziala writes a story of fast attraction under intense circumstances. A self-formed woman of 26 with a concentrated desire (bordering on obsession) to squash Lex Keith and his rotten life does have some light within reach behind those walls. And a caring alpha with a rough streak who gives Alex reason to believe that her life doesn’t have to be as dark as she lives it.
‘Monster’ has an appreciation for dark histories, marred characters and grim situations without falling into generic tropes. A lively twist to the general genre of contemporary romance – one that explores the dark mundanity of Alex’s life, the firm acceptance of Breaker’s, and a fast love that teaches Alex that she isn’t alone.
‘Sometimes love didn’t spring up on you in a moment of blinding clarity. Sometimes it crept up on you on a Tuesday night while you were standing at the sink doing the dishes, the feeling settling into your soul in a way that made it too heavy to ignore anymore.’
‘How he brought me out of my shell and showed me a hundred thousand things worth living for.’ I gave this book 4 stars -
Trigger Warning: Frequent mention of overdosing, mentions drug taking, copious amounts of swearing, lots of conversations about physical abuse (child abuse) and rapes that have previously taken place, attempted rape and multiple sex scenes.
Note: I really like Breaker’s character, but I didn’t like a specific word he repeatedly used to address women!
_______________________________________
My Rating System: ★ - 1 star: I did not like the book ★★ - 2 stars: The book was okay ★★★ - 3 stars: It was a good, solid read ★★★★ - 4 stars: A great book ★★★★★ - 5: A phenomenal read _______________________________________
Some quotes from the book:
‘I wasn’t of the mind to believe in a after life. To put faith in the idea of floating up into a place of no pain, only peace and happiness. It seemed the stuff of fairy tales. Something to spoon feed scared children. Something to use to convince people that life was some magical experience dreamed up by some all-seeing God’ ‘I wasn’t scared of anything. Not the way most people were. Not in a way that made them cautious, that made them second guess things they wanted to do. I just barrelled ahead, to hell with the consequences. What was the worst that could happen? I’d die? So what? “No, I’m not…” “You’re so scared of life that you’re not fuckin’ scared of dyin’, Alex”… ‘I knew nothing about love. But it took six kisses to get from his mouth to his ear. Nine, ear to collarbone. Sixteen, collarbone to hipbone. And sometimes, when he was tired, he was ticklish right there in that hollow. No, I knew nothing about love. But I swear all I wanted to do for the rest of my life was lie on his chest, stealing his warmth, feeling him trace shapes into my hip. I wanted to slip my fingers between his. There were seventeen scars on his hands. I wanted to know the story of every last one. If that wasn’t love…well, then I didn’t know what was.’ Leave a comment and lets talk about 'Monster'...
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