Review by Kayleigh
Series Name: Sorrowsong University, #1
This is a ride of a book featuring billionaire bad boys, stalkers and murder.
Favourite Quote:
Russian Mafia. That adds up. Christ. One day you’re tearing a fifteen percent off fabric softener coupon out of a magazine and pickin noodles out of your sink drain, the next, you’re fighting for your life inside an Al Pacino movie.
Book Synopsis:
Isolated in the Scottish Highlands, Sorrowsong University only welcomes students from the most powerful families. Ophelia Winters doesn’t belong, but a rare scholarship grants her the perfect opportunity to investigate her parents’ “accidental” death near the castle grounds.
Things get off to a rocky start when she runs afoul of the mysterious Alex Corbeau-Green – son of her prime suspect. As far as she’s concerned, he is just a younger version of his billionaire father. A monster hiding beneath a beautiful façade.
When an unknown tormentor begins to stalk Ophelia, she realizes she may not be able to survive Sorrowsong on her own. Alex becomes her unexpected ally – and alibi for murder. And as she begins to fall for the soft heart that hides beneath his hard exterior, her hunger for revenge wavers for the first time.
Review:
I love a boarding school book where wealthy kids behave badly. Nightshade and the Sorrowsong duet feed me this so so so well. Ophelia Winters is the poor scholarship student set on figuring out her parents (who were staff at the university) death. She thinks she knows who is to blame, and she is set on revenge. Of course, the bad man’s son is the most handsome and magnetic student at the school and Ophelia instantly hates and lusts for him. Alex Corbeau-Green is a poor little rich boy: he has all the money in the world and a tragic and abusive family story. He doesn’t understand why Ophelia hates him and his friends but he’s determined to get her to like him.
As Ophelia tries to figure out this new school, these insanely wealthy students who circle her like sharks, and dig her way out of a crippling depression, bad things start to happen around her. She’s being stalked and someone wants to end her life. Is it the same person who killed her parents? With the survival skills of a kitten, Ophelia is going to try and figure this out. Let’s just say that it’s good that her new friends and frenemies are mob families among others. They do clean up well.
Through all this turmoil, Ophelia and Alex can’t keep each other off of their minds. And eventually they can’t keep their hands off of each other. However, their relationship also develops sweetly and slowly. Ophelia learns to see behind Alex’s social mask and realizes there’s a caring human behind his bravado. It suddenly becomes a lot harder for her to hurt the man when she sees the people it will impact. They fall in love despite themselves and I truly was living for their banter, pining, and slow acceptance that they make each other better. I was truly rooting for them by the cliff hanger end.
I loved getting to see Sorrowsong, the university and really want to know more about it: it’s lore, the different houses you get sorted into, the interesting dynamics between students etc. It’s a great setting for a dark and twisty and slightly toxic love story.
