We hope you’re enjoying our Capsule Book Club recommendations! This month, we’re getting those summer reading, escapist vibes with another book from the romantasy genre: Six Scorched Roses by Carissa Broadbent. A plucky heroine needs help from the local vampire in order to save the lives of everyone in her small town – but will they fall in love along the way?! A delight of a book that is an example of what the romantasy genre does best. (Click here for our previous book club installments!)
Capsule x The Warehouse (all items featured in our main photo are also available at The Warehouse!)
There is a simple, slightly pervy question I offer to you now to work out if this is a book for you: as a child – or adult – did you find the dynamic of Beauty and the Beast confusingly horny?
If so, welcome to Six Scorched Roses and, in fact, the entire genre of romantasy.
We’ve written before about the rise of fairy smut and it’s a genre of books that is only growing – positively heaving, if you will – as more and more women go, ‘What if there was a genre of books like Twilight but not written about teenagers, so I don’t have to feel weird reading them as I hit 40?’
Now, it’s not a perfect genre. As I’ve written before, if I start a book and immediately have to learn about 12 different moons, and/or warring factions of dragons and fairies… I’m not thrilled about it. I’m too old for this level of remembering things!
And my biggest complaint is that a lot of these books take themselves EXREMELY SERIOUSLY, rather than leaning into the camp factor of all things fantasy. We’re here to have fun, guys! This isn’t War and Peace!
Six Scorched Roses, however, avoids all of this romantasy pitfalls and delivers a book that is a genuine delight to read – it’s well-written (if you’re a smut reader, you know that’s not a given) and the main two characters are full of charisma, pathos and then, yes, horniness.
The main character is Lilith, who has had one foot in the grave since she was born. But when a mysterious disease starts wiping out her town and turning everyone to dust, including her beloved younger sister, she knows she has to find help in an unexpected place: the town’s mysterious vampire, Vale! Because his immortal blood may hold the cure to a vaccine. Luckily, he is extremely sexy and scary and funny and secretly, maybe a little bit kind???
Sure, there’s other stuff going on about vampire worlds and curses and Gods and awful dads and science versus magic but the main relationship between Lilith and hot vampire Vale is what you’re here for, and it doesn’t disappoint.
As they get to know each other – and as she visits his mysterious lair of a castle, to collect his blood – they develop a friendship that leads to something more *WINK*.
Author Carissa Broadbent is a New York Times bestselling author and the creator of the Crowns of Nyaxia series, and the author of The Serpent and The Wings of Night, and The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King.
Six Scorched Roses is a standalone book born out of that world but it was such a genuinely good time to read, I’m going to seek out the other books in the world and spend a bit more time with Lilith and Vale.
Whether you’re a long-term romantasy reader or looking to explore the genre – but have been put off by the cringe-factor of some of the other books along the way – then this is a great holiday read to get started with. I absolutely ripped through it and am thrilled to have met a great new author with a best-selling back catalogue to work through over the summer!