Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Ist: let me say I'm a huge fan of Sherrilyn Kenyon, I have all of her books, have read them over and over again and even purchased them all again in an eBook format. Some of my all-time favourite books and characters are in the Dark Hunter series and Acheron has been my number one favorite character ever! (although this book may have changed that) However, I have to say that I'm very disappointed in this one...I think Ms. Kenyon went way, way too far and over the line in this book with the bad childhood scenario. If you think Acheron had a bad childhood and life that was a cake walk compared to Styxx's. The first 600+ pages were filled with more child and adult abuse then I have ever read before. I had to skim a lot through these parts as it was turning my stomach and was very disturbing. We are talking about violent physical abuse and torture starting from a very early age that continued all through the book, but it got even worse, all his young boyhood and his adult life were filled with vicious rapes, violent gang rapes, public gang rapes and all humiliations in between, over and over and over again. Also it was strongly hinting that Acheron and Styxx when drugged might have had a sexual contact. (yuck) Almost everyone he ever came into contact from family, soldiers and gods either abused him, raped him or humiliated him in some bad way. Not to mention having to endure over 11,000 years in total isolation, who wouldn't be crazy after that! But he wasn't of course. Despite all this the writer still wanted the reader to believe that Styxx could always be so self-sacrificing to everyone including all those that betrayed him (which was almost everyone in the book) and that he even became a better person that Acheron ever was. (Acheron's words) Unlikely! I seriously wouldn't even call this book a romance, there was very little of that. Probably only around 100 of the 830ish pages had Styxx and Beth interacting and even she betrays him. It was hard to get into this so called romance as all you could feel was pity for Styxx and just wanting all this torture to end. There were some good things that I liked believe it or not...the last 150 pages or so were good - some of the favs were back Ash, Tory and Urian and alot of others. Also, the story wove around events from other Dark Hunter books that Styxx appeared in and when he impersonated Acheron which was cool as you got his point of view of the events. It's just my opinion that this story could have been written with less violent child/adult abuse and child/adult rapes and gang rapes it happened way too often and went on far too long. There doesn't need to be this much in a romance book for sure nor should it be that entertaining to anyone except maybe child abusers.