Master of Salt and Bones
by Keri Lake
When I was a little girl, I dreamed a handsome knight would come and rescue me from my wretched mother. He'd ride up on his white steed and break the curse I've been fated to carry since the day I was born.
Funny how things changed over time. How the fairy tale twisted into something far more crooked, darker than I ever imagined.
In reality, my knight is scarred and broken, living alone in a castle of bones that overlooks the sea. He isn’t searching for me. He never was.
Lucian Blackthorne is as cursed as I am, and equally shunned by the locals, the fishers of men, who believe him to be the devil in the flesh.
Perhaps he is, with the way his amber eyes draw me in, ignite me like an infernal blaze. And the sins he whispers in my ear are as wickedly intoxicating as the man himself.
Yet, his touch is heaven and his will is my weakness.
He calls us forbidden, an unsalvageable tragedy, with no happy end. Maybe we are. But in this story, he’s the one who needs saving.
Spice Level: 4.75/6 | Story Score: 8.5/10 | Rating: 4.25/5 |
This book has been on my TBR since it came out in 2020. I like the title and I thought the cover was absolutely beautiful. I feel like someone dropped a post about it in one of my groups not too long ago to remind me of it and when I saw the EROS Monthly challenge for January (books that have been on my TBR for more than a year), I figured I’d give it a go. I’ve been steering myself away from longer books, but sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet, ya know?
I feel like this book is going to be hard to review for me. I don’t often read dark romances - and if I do, they’re only superficially dark. This one is wreaking havoc on my head currently. There were so few things light about this story. For that reason, for the trope list, I’m going with ‘Trauma’.
The characters were traumatized.
I feel traumatized.
This story is a mindfuck. I think if that was a trope, it’d be the one I chose. Or family dysfunction? Whew. The timeline is staggered between present day and then working from 16 years ago forward, with the first one being out of order to begin with. The first couple are a bit harder to place because you’re still getting the feel of the story and this author was new to me, but fairly quickly, that leveled out and it became easier to maneuver.
I found the main characters to be engaging and endearing and ‘worth’ the darkness for this book for me. Honestly, that is saying something and a giant credit to the author because the amount of ‘nope’ in this book was real for me. (Like I said, I don’t read dark often.) This storyline is INCREDIBLY COMPLETE. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a story that was so complete and for as many sparks as this one threw off, I’m so impressed that EACH one of them turned into a firework that I was able to watch go off.
I cannot give a solid synopsis of this book because everything is like “this happened or maybe it didn’t” and giving any more than that away would ruin the entire adventure.
As far as spicy scenes go, I will say that while there were quite a few, they weren’t written to my taste. Not the acts themselves, but the actual verbiage used. They were worded in a way that I wasn’t as immersed in them and able to experience them as I prefer - instead, often I was left rereading them because the wording was strange and took more effort to follow. If I could’ve read them in a way to experience them, this book may have gotten to a high 5 for me.
I didn’t find a list of triggers anywhere for this book, but I still find there is enough content in this book that could be triggering.
-SPOILERS-
Don’t read these if you plan to read this book. To ride this ride, you just need to get on. For that reason, I’m going to TRY to separate these into two sections. Warnings and Plot.
Again: *shouting* CHECK YOUR TRIGGERS.
While there aren't any on-page, active story things that glare at you, there are a lot of flashbacks and those could be enough in the case of this book. We have an older-woman-/-underage-boy…in which she shows him the fun of knife and breath play…without prior consent (if you want to argue that a 16 year old can give consent). You have a father hitting his son, a mother sentencing him to “aversion therapy,” his friend drowning. You have a girl with a junkie mom, who’s a recovering cutter, who was molested and assaulted, who stabbed people. You have the murder of a child and the suicide of a loved one. You have multiple other murders.
Ya’ll this book is a walking dark cloud.
Now onto my unfiltered thoughts.
Every character besides Lucian, Isa, and Makaio (and Aunt Midge at times) sucked giant donkey balls. And Rhea and Kelsey, but they're hardly present long enough to count. Above that, there is WAY TOO MUCH TOUCHING WITHOUT CONSENT in this story. I felt TERRIBLE for these characters. So many people lost all of their body autonomy in this book. It was heartbreaking.
Solange fucking disgusted me. I found her character appalling and I am glad she died. She was a child predator and I don’t care who wants to fight about it. “Let me show you a trick” is not an argument for when someone tells you no. Drugging a teenage boy so that you can jerk him off while he is also fighting to not drown, after he told you no, because your trick sexual asphyxiation… Ugh. If these scenes weren’t written in the past tense, I would’ve closed this book.
A Nazi Sadism secret society was…once again…appalling. How the fuck this author made this not seem outrageous is incredible. Obviously, you aren’t supposed to like the group, but the fact that she didn’t make it seem too far-fetched is scary. Lol. The former Mayor was a monster. His dad was a monster. His mom was worse than anyone else. My God, how you write a 500+ page book with so many characters and only 4 are likable, but the book is still good is mind blowing.
The amounts of twists in this book were innumerable to the point that I can’t quite think it all through yet. I think this one is going to give me a hangover.
Standalone | 552 Pages | Trope Challenge: Trauma |
I went in search of the villain, instead, and found him alone and in pain, living in a castle of bones. A darker version of my mother’s knight, whose armor had dents and cracks, and his hands sullied with blood. A broken man who tasted of salt and depravity, and who took me selfishly, without apology. He’s the curse my mother warned me about. The Devil of Bonesalt, the Mad Son, with whom I’ve fallen irrevocably in love.
- Isadora, Master of Salt and Bones by Keri Lake
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