Published December 4th, 2018 by Science Future Press
Print Length: 286 pages
Genre: Dark Romance, Adult Fiction, Contemporary Romance, Erotic Romance, Erotica
Amazon / Goodreads
My Review
Warning: I feel I should warn you that this book is dark and will fuck with your minds. If you think you can handle it, go ahead and enjoy the ride but you have been warned.
I’m starting my review by saying that this book was a big mind fuck and I had such a great time reading it. No matter how confused the story made me at times, when I got into it I couldn’t put it down.
Connor and Keira are the main couple in this story but they are not, at least in my opinion, the only main characters in this story. We have a whole cast of characters, a group of friends that include this couple, that will make you go round and round, pulling your hair sometimes and pressing your nose against your e-reader at other times.
In the beginning, I found it hard to understand what was going on. JA Huss started the story part way in, or in the middle, but the reader was dropped in the middle of something and it took me a couple of chapters to understand what was all about. I think that was a brilliant move from the author’s part because it hooks the reader. It certainly hooked me.
The plot was full of twists and turns that made me feel confused, scared, confused again and a whole lot of emotions that I could be talking about them for a long time. It was like a big giant puzzle and you didn’t know if you were doing it right or wrong because you didn’t have the instructions. Sometimes you didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.
As much as I enjoyed the myriad of emotions, the twist, and turns of the plot, the amazing cast of characters that completed The Dirty Ones, the confusion I faced most of the time and the dark undertone of the story pushed me out of the book more than once.
I had to read The Dirty Ones in conjunction with another book because I couldn’t stay inside the story for more than one chapter at a time until the 20% mark. I read one chapter of The Dirty Ones and then one chapter of another romance novel that I decided to read. I don’t do this, read 2 books at a time, but I was so scared and confused that I just couldn’t commit to this book alone.
Dark Romance is a sub-genre of Romance that I don’t read as much as I would like, primarily because I’m a scary-cat but also because I prefer my romances steamy and in the grey spectrum of colors. What drove me to pick The Dirty Ones was the fact that I’ve seen and heard so much about JA Huss and I wanted to read her work.
I’m not disappointed at all. I was expecting the emotions, the confusion, the fear, as much as I expected to love the book, which I did. I know it’s confusing but I just can’t give the book less than 5 stars because it just blew my mind when I finally got into it.
If you’re thinking of reading this book, I would absolutely recommend it. I would just advice you to see if any of the warnings the author put up could trigger you because there are some seriously dark themes in this story. Besides that, enjoy.
Disclaimer: I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book provided by Netgalley. The opinions expressed are my own.
About the Author
J.A. Huss never wanted to be a writer and she still dreams of that elusive career as an astronaut. She originally went to school to become an equine veterinarian but soon figured out they keep horrible hours and decided to go to grad school instead. That Ph.D wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (and she really sucked at the whole scientist thing), so she dropped out and got a M.S. in forensic toxicology just to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.
After graduation she got a job with the state of Colorado as their one and only hog farm inspector and spent her days wandering the Eastern Plains shooting the shit with farmers. After a few years of that, she got bored. And since she was a homeschool mom and actually does love science, she decided to write science textbooks and make online classes for other homeschool moms. She wrote more than two hundred of those workbooks and was the number one publisher at the online homeschool store many times, but eventually she covered every science topic she could think of and ran out of shit to say.
So in 2012 she decided to write fiction instead. That year she released her first three books and started a career that would make her a New York Times bestseller and land her on the USA Today Bestseller’s List eighteen times in the next three years. Her books have sold millions of copies all over the world, the audio version of her semi-autobiographical book, Eighteen, was nominated for a Voice Arts Award and an Audie award in 2016 and 2017 respectively, her audiobook Mr. Perfect was nominated for a Voice Arts Award in 2017, and her book, Taking Turns, was nominated for an Audie Award in 2018. Johnathan McClain is her first (and only) writing partner and even though they are worlds apart in just about every way imaginable, it works.
She lives on a ranch in Central Colorado with her family.