Let me say this straight away: I don’t recommend this series to people who don’t have much relationship experience or who, for other reasons, might not be aware of how some of the relationships depicted here are abusive. I also don’t recommend it for people who might get triggered by reading about emotional abuse, blackmailing or characters considering sexual assault.
My impression of books 1 and 2 (official English translation):
I assume you've already read the synopsis on this page. Fundamentally, this is a romance plot about a clueless protagonist and two main male leads: her adopted brother and her fiancé. There are mystery/thriller elements that I liked. Twists that I felt were creative as well as foreshadowed to some degree. The romance with her fiancé is very charming.
However, I won’t be reading this series any further because of one reason I can’t overlook: the brother character. He’s not the only problematic character but to me he stuck out as the worst by far.
The protagonist is portrayed as a caring girl who is blissfully unaware of peoples’ romantic feelings toward her. I don’t say this lightly but the dynamic with her (adoptive) brother makes me sick to my stomach. He is in love with her and INCREDIBLY possessive, to the point of abuse, while she only sees him as a little brother whom she depends on for emotional support and help with her plans for survival. There are multiple scenes where he restricts her physically while she tries to get away, usually out of jealousy. He reacts harshly when she gets close to other people and attempts to separate them from her by limiting the information she receives about them or preventing meetings, effectively isolating her to himself. If she does something against his will or he believes she has secrets from him, he will distance himself from the protagonist. The heroine will usually blame herself for him being upset, become riddled with guilt and apologize.
As someone who has experienced abusive situations before, I felt physically ill reading some scenes. In one scene in particular, the protagonist sneaks into her brothers bed because she is terrified of sleeping alone and, upon waking up to this, he lusts after her to the point of contemplating raping the sleeping girl because ‘it would be easy’ and defiling her would make her unable to marry anyone else. He never sexually assaults her but I haven’t felt sick like this while reading for a long time, particularly because I didn’t expect anything like it when I picked up this series.
I don’t know who thought this was a good way to write a character because he is NOT portrayed as an antagonist. He is supposed to be a tragic character who struggles with his childhood love not recognising his feelings. As with quite a few “romance” novels, I think the fact that relationships like this aren’t called out for being abusive can end up being very harmful to readers who might not be able to differentiate between a healthy and abusive relationship yet. There are a lot of unhealthy relationships in the media we come across and it can lead us to assume what we read is simply how people express love, concern, protectiveness etc. It can be very harmful to you, I’m speaking from my own experience here.
Final verdict: I think this series has a lot going for it but when I say reading book 2 made me cry and gag at some point, I mean it. If you don’t get triggered by the topics I described above and still feel like reading it, there are some very enjoyable parts to these two books. That’s why I’m giving this series 5 stars instead of 0. However I won’t be touching the third one once it comes out.
