India R. Adams’ Ivy’s Poison is the 5th of the Cavalieri Della Morte books, and it really knocked me out. I mean, I wanted to give it all the stars and then some.
Before I get into my review, I want to strongly recommend that you read India’s warning at the beginning of the book and believe it. There are a couple of very sensitive places in the book, at some readers might not want to read those things. And that’s OK. We all like different things and have different tolerances for different things. What’s important is that you are aware of what things upset you and that you read accordingly. To be helpful, India does include page numbers to skip.
As I was thinking about what to write about this, I was going through my brain and thumbing through the Arthurian tales files that live there to see if I could come up with any trivia about Bors, but the only thing I could think of came from a movie called King Arthur where Bors, played by Ray Winstone, talks about his cock being like a baby’s arm holding an apple. I could probably look up more trivia, but I’m going to just leave you with that.
Bors is a hand-to-hand specialist when it comes to the Cavalieri Della Morte. When you want to make an example of someone, Bors is who you send. So, when Arthur sends him out after the prez of an MC, Bors knows that the guy must’ve done something bad.
When he gets there and is sitting at a bar, in comes some of the MC, along with the prez’s daughter, Ivy. That shocks him, since he’d met Ivy three years ago, when they had a crazy night together. And oh yeah, she drugged him. Bors knew that the jackass had a daughter, but he didn’t know it was the woman who had haunted him for 3 years.
This book is technically a dual POV, but in practice, it’s really a sole POV. And that POV is Bors’. I really do find it fascinating to read a primarily male POV MF romance story. When you think of MF, we tend to think of it as female driven, which means that the main POV should be the female, right? And in many cases, I would totally agree with that. And I’m good with single, dual, multi POV, whatever the story calls for and the author thinks appropriate, but there are times when the male POV and the single (or functionally single) POV is the only way to tell the story. And this is one of those times.
Since it’s told mostly by Bors, we get to understand him and his filter. I think that we get to learn more about Bors than he even knows about himself. There are things that I think that he was hiding from himself that we get hints of before he gets to them. We also get to learn about Ivy mostly from him, and I was totally enthralled by that. He learns about her very organically, I think, so we do too. He picks up little bits here and there that he puts together and connects the way that you and I would, and in fact, I think that India put things in there that we pick up on before he puts them together, and it’s not that she outright states anything, but she leads us into them. It’s totally fabulous.
Oh, Ivy. My heart breaks. And there was one point where Bors just totally broke me altogether.
OK, that’s all I have to say about this one. You know what to do. Happy reading!
In Between the Pages 