The Vicious Lost Boys: Series Review (Spoiler Free)

The Never King by Nikki St. Crowe
Genres: Dark Romance, Fantasy
Goodreads

The stories were all wrong — Hook was never the villain.
For two centuries, all of the Darling women have disappeared on their 18th birthday. Sometimes they’re gone for only a day, some a week or a month. But they always return broken.
Now, on the afternoon of my 18th birthday, my mother is running around the house making sure all the windows are barred and the doors locked.
But it’s pointless.
Because when night falls, he comes for me. And this time, the Never King and the Lost Boys aren’t willing to let me go.

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*This review is spoiler free.
**This is a review for the series as a whole. I won’t be going into the nitty-gritty of each book (mostly just the last one to wrap up how I feel about the series)
***This series is smut. If you don’t like smut, you can ignore this whole review!

And onto the review!

This is a Peter Pan retelling that totally knocked my socks off.  Until the last book.

But wait, let me start with the good.

The first book absolutely pulled me in. I devoured that thing. In fact, I devoured the first three books just in time for the fourth one to be released.

Things I loved about the first three:

• Each male character had a personality and unique interests
• Fun banter
• Plenty of smut but a good story with it
• The island was like a character in itself with times it actually had purpose to the story

Then I read the fourth book. And it lost me.

A lot of what I loved from the first three just wasn’t there. It took me weeks to finish it, instead of the hours it took me for the other three.

Each character jut really lost what made them them from the other books. Some kind of took a backseat and you didn’t see much of them (which makes no sense in a RH), and others who were normally hard became soft. I felt the first half of the book was just each POV repeatedly talking about how they felt about the villain. There’s really no other way for me to explain that – it was just a lot of emotions about the villain instead of anything actually happening. I saw another reviewer describe Peter Pan’s take as a midlife crisis, and that really is what the entire book feels like.

Pout. Whine. Woe is me. Wah. Wah. Wah.
^ Every character.

Also, the plot was a hot mess by the ending, which wasn’t the case in the first three. What was the point of the villain? What was the villains’ motivations? I didn’t care nor understand what the villain actually wanted. Who was Peter Pan? I mean, it was addressed, but for half a second then we all moved on. And why did just a bunch of convenient things keep happening? Oh, the characters are stuck on this one thing? Here’s a convenient solution! It was all over the place. It felt very rushed and thrown together in order to get to the spinoff with Roc – which I don’t think I’ll bother reading.

So, things I didn’t like about the last book:

• The characters lost their personalities and uniqueness. We learn nothing new about any of them and it’s a lot of whining
• The banter just wasn’t there like the last three
• Where’d the smut go? There were just 2 scenes. Plus, it felt like there was a main relationship, which shouldn’t happen with a RH
• The islands actions made no sense and I was left with so many questions.

With all that said about book four, overall, I did enjoy this series. The first two were my favorite, while the third one didn’t hold me as much, but the ending was superb. The fourth one simply felt like it was thrown together to wrap it up and the author’s attention was maybe elsewhere (like the spinoff series I mentioned above). Do I think this series is worth it? Yes. I would still recommend it. Besides, they’re all super short. Each of them is under 250 pages each, so why not? There just wasn’t much to love in the last book, is all.

MY RATINGS:

The Never King – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Dark One – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Their Vicious Darling – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Fae Princes – ⭐⭐

Whomp. Whomp.