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The Rycke (Monstrous, #3)

Lily Mayne

Start date: June 21, 2022

Finish date: June 25, 2022

Discussion: Buddy Reads

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What Members Thought

Dec 10, 2021 Aja James rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite-series

The Rycke is a great addition to Lily Mayne's Monstrous series. As with all of her books and characters, I can envision them so clearly. She describes their characteristics in wonderful detail, so that even if you were tempted to see a human in the monster's place, you can't really. They truly are monsters. And the fact that the humans fall in love with them despite that difference -- whether it's size, anatomy, looks, horns, claws, etc. -- that's what unconditional love is all about.

Ghost is th ...more

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Jun 27, 2022 Marion rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favorite, fantasy, challenged-heroes, can-t-wait-tbr, series-to-finish, free-reads, favourite-author, age-gap, humor, buddy-read

4.5 Stars!

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Aug 21, 2024 CN rated it liked it

The Rycke has so much love from reviewers here, including ones with whom my tastes are normally aligned, so maybe it's me, but:

1. The main characters take a week to fall in love. That's just too much insta-love/insta-lust for my tastes.
2. The explanation about why the Rycke have human genitalia was...not great. I get that previous reviews had talked about why the monsters had dicks, but I would have preferred to continue to roll with sort of humanoid monsters and have no explanation rather than

The Rycke has so much love from reviewers here, including ones with whom my tastes are normally aligned, so maybe it's me, but:

1. The main characters take a week to fall in love. That's just too much insta-love/insta-lust for my tastes.
2. The explanation about why the Rycke have human genitalia was...not great. I get that previous reviews had talked about why the monsters had dicks, but I would have preferred to continue to roll with sort of humanoid monsters and have no explanation rather than the nonsense one we got. It just led to more questions, like why does Aury have an asshole if he doesn't eat/produce waste? And why the copious cum even if the Ryckes needed dicks for seduction purposes?
3. Ghost's main personality trait is that he hates getting sent out into the Wastes. I just continue to find the humans in this series bland when compared with their monster counterparts. How does this boring guy have not one, but two monsters desperately in love with him?
4. Cutter is supposed to be the villain, but the dude isn't wrong about the potential danger Aury poses to the camp and that gets completely dismissed.
5. Ghost gets over Aury's transformation and subsequent wholesale slaughter of the Topeka raider camp, including people he knew, in about three minutes. Felt like such a lost opportunity to have him wrestle with his feelings, which would have added a lot more to his character and to the narrative momentum.

As always with this series, I think there are some intriguing things here. It was great to spend time in a raider camp rather than just roaming The Wastes, and there are so many great side characters that I want more of (Moth, Lilac, Rig, Anchor, even the missing Cat). The ending is simply lovely.

I do continue to wish we saw more of the monsters' POV. There's so much about this world that I like, but no individual book has been an outstanding read for me. Mary and her menagerie were quite creepy, though, and I look forward to seeing Rig's adventure.

3 stars ...more

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