Neva AltajRomance · Fiction
Burned Dreams
Synopsis
Alessandro has spent eight years plotting revenge. Now he has found the man he blames, and he takes a job from him: guarding his wife, Ravenna, and keeping her safe. His real plan is to kill the woman he was hired to protect, so that her husband suffers as he did.
Ravenna lives under Alessandro's dark, steady gaze and cannot escape it. Bruises cover her body, and each one marks a dream that burned. She also feels a craving for a man she believes she can never have.
The book is a mafia romance told in alternating first-person voices, Alessandro's and Ravenna's. The setup is a bodyguard with a vow he means to break, a wife in a violent marriage, and an attraction that neither of them can afford. Alessandro's plan leaves no room for mercy.
Burned Dreams is a full-length novel with several open-door love scenes. There is no cheating, and the happy ending is guaranteed. It is the seventh book in the Perfectly Imperfect mafia series. Each book follows a different couple and works as a standalone, though the series has a recommended reading order.
How it reads
Prose complexity 1/10
- I’m… disappointed. The premise sounded interesting and I think it had a lot of potential but the final result is probably the laziest installment of the Perfectly Imperfect series. The characters had no personality and their interactions are limited to car drives and shopping and we’re supposed to believe they fell in love when they barely talked to each other. You can’t empathize with their trauma and sad past because it was very briefly explained. I honestly didn’t care about Alessandro’s dead wife or his revenge plan because it meant nothing to me. We’ve read about Az in other books and through Sergei’s memories and idk but I was expecting him to be crazier? more interesting? more dangerous? He was plain and boring, not to mention very blind. How could he miss all the red flags on Ravenna’s abuse?<br><br>- - - - - - - -<br><br>Other reviews from the series<br><br>I read this series in 2 days. What can I say, work was very light and had nothing else to do, and since I feel like what I have to say about each individual book it's pretty much the same I will copy and paste and probably add an extra paragraph with specifics if needed.<br><br>Although I liked it, it felt a bit superficial.I was expecting more darkness ??? More depth, to the characters, to the story, even to the mafia parts. There was no development, no character growth. I feel like it's lacking quite a bit and it's kind of disappointing because it really has a lot of potential as a dark mafia romance, but it never got to touch a more complex layer, it remained surface level, like a draft and not a completed piece. It's a very light mafia story, and given it´s popularity I was expecting more.<br><br>Something I really liked was the author adding new things to the genre. Yes, it has some cliches, but you can overlook them by being immersed in other parts of the stories. The characters felt new, different and contemporary, not just a repetition of the same mafia stereotypes, some were vulnerable, some were smart, and it was a really nice surprise, I guess that's why I got to finish the series.<br><br>
- 3.7⭐️