
Naw. It’s because it’s about the person inside is who you fall in love with and a common through-line is despite the appearance they’re usually kind, protective, & want to provide without expectation which is often something the fl hasn’t found from human men. Women relate to the fl because men often aren’t kind, aren’t loyal, and often expect things that they’ll never reciprocate.
Hahaha I’m a woman, read it and only extremely sweet & soft contemporary. It’s also a way to explore dark themes but not have them be “real.” The reader’s that freak me out are the really dark contemporary readers. That’s too real for me and I can’t believe Haunting Adeline has unironic fans. If you don’t believe me I can provide you some titles though you’d probably just say the monster was “some beta bitch no woman would actually like”… can confirm women like them. 😄
I refuse to touch that book. Or any that I know doesn’t have an HEA. I read one book where one of my favorite characters died suddenly & horribly mid book (AND IT WAS A COZY ROMANCE) his fiance was the next book’s fl. I DNFed the author’s entire body of work out of rage. The world can be dark and gloomy but I need the couples actual relationship to be good together or at the barest minimum that if they hurt each other I need to feel the healing and see the work before the book’s close to done.
My bff is a dark romance reader but according to her “I don’t actually want this rl, I just need to remind myself that this is toxic shit and no bueno.” She’s read Haunting Adeline and said she almost DNFed a few times but she just put it down, watched something soft and happy and did some chores before coming back to continue. She said it’s not on her repeat list, she just couldn’t walk away from it without seeing the ending.
She has made my taste a little darker (ironically a little closer to what was reading when I first started out as a kid — my first romance was Breath of Scandal by Sandra Brown. 🤦♀️ Lesson to parents: know what’s in your bookshelf because if you have a reader, they’ll find it. Then I moved on to Carpathian vampires for a while. But my taste steadily got lighter as I got older. Now my midnight dark roast (like 1/15 books) is just about her medium.