Rating: 4 Stars

Publisher: Holden Cox

Genre: Gay Fantasy Erotic Romance

Tags: Fantasy, Age Gap (Centuries), Fated Mates, Humor, Multiple Partners, Opposites Attract, Romance, Series

Length: 298 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

This review has spoilers.

If you’re not a fan of main characters having sex with others on page, this won’t be for you. It’s only done when Pip and Aeldryc are together, never when they’re apart.

Blurb –

A great warrior. Decades of hard-won peace. All unraveled by a pair of sparkly shorts.

Pip

My life was mostly under control. Sort of. Okay, fine, not really — but I made good money. Then I fell through a magical portal to a land where ‘cage dancer’ wasn’t a job, nobody understood that shorts were a fashion choice, and my twink joke didn’t land. At all.

So now I’m being interrogated by a seven-foot wall of leather-clad muscle who keeps threatening me with a dungeon.

(No, not that kind of dungeon. Believe me, I asked.)

Lucky for me I’m charming, because I talked him into a bedroom instead. Not his bedroom, sadly.

He keeps glaring at me and threatening me with my idea of a good time. And if I misbehave, he might even punish me.

Here’s hoping.

Aeldryc

Qoksmere was at peace for the first time in centuries, and it wasn’t boring. It was a relief. The borders were quiet, the people were settled, and my only duty was to lead the Queen’s elite Grey Guard in very important routine training exercises.

Then a human appeared out of nowhere in the smallest trousers I’d ever seen.

Pip understands nothing, refuses to be appropriately alarmed about his situation, and looks at me like he wants to be ruined.

So when the Queen tasks me with finding the truth behind his presence here, I’m fully committed to a thorough, hands-on investigation. Which is why I’ve moved him into my rooms. To be thorough.

If only I could get him to behave.

Because good boys deserve their treats.

Pip and the Shadow Daddy is Book 1 of Twinkpocalypse — a high-heat MM romantasy series about an ancient magical kingdom scrambling to deal with the consequences of a portal that won’t stop leaking twinks.

What to expect:

• A stern centuries-old fae warrior with a thing for praise, discipline and showing off what’s his
• An irrepressible chaos agent with a sharp wit and zero impulse control who just wants someone to see him
• Size difference
• Age gap measured in centuries
• Kink discovered enthusiastically and on-page
• Magical restraints
• A dom who very much likes to watch
• MMM+ scenes: shared then reclaimed
• Spice level: pages may stick together
• HEA guaranteed.

Review –

“I’m a twink!”

“Is that a… magical being?” Thyren asked.

Pip beamed. “Some who’ve had me might say so.”

I picked this book up for the title alone, not knowing what to expect. I was looking for a little quirky. I got that in spades.

Pip is a dancer at Club Vortex, a nightclub in San Jose, California. He’s just found himself in another world – literally. The last thing he remembers before landing face-first in the grass in the new place is twerking in front of a mirror with his best friend, Sky. He’s wearing tiny sparkly shorts and a crop top. That’s not just his work uniform when he’s dancing in cages. It’s pretty much his everyday clothing as well. Pip doesn’t believe in covering his legs, and the shorter the better, whether it’s a skirt or shorts.

Aeldryc is Fae. He’s Aeldryc the Ironstorm, The Lord Commander of the Grey Guard of Qoksmere. He and his guards are on a search for someone who doesn’t belong. They were sent to investigate after they’d become aware of a sighting. That someone, of course, is Pip, who identifies as a twink. Well, Aeldryc doesn’t know what a twink is, so it comes across as the ‘twinks’ are not just Pip’s people – which they totally are – but an actual species.

Pip doesn’t speak the language until he’s given a ring to wear that translates for him. He definitely doesn’t dress like the locals. He’s an oddity… an oddity who wants the seven-foot Aeldryc from the moment his little five-foot self sees him. The feeling is mutual, though Aeldryc isn’t as vocal about it as Pip is.

Long story short, Pip is taken back to Qoksmere, and introduced to Queen Delsynarea.

“A twink,” the Queen said, testing the word. “We have not encountered this creature before. Is it magical?”

Pip winked at the Queen of Feravael. “Only in bed, Your Majesty.”

He’s then locked up in Aeldryc’s spare bedroom. It doesn’t take long before the two are having sex, and Aeldryc is feeling something he’s not felt in centuries – arousal that goes beyond a quick need.

Pip is loud, he’s a little obnoxious, and he always, ALWAYS says the wrong thing in front of Queen Delsynarea. He’s obsessed with sex. He wears as few articles of clothing as possible. He drives Aeldryc absolutely crazy, and not just with lust.

There are other characters who are important to the story, but I’m having a hard enough time keeping Aeldryc’s name straight in this review, so I won’t attempt to list the others. Kudos to the author for writing them over and over in the book and for keeping up with them. I’d have a migraine before I made it to the 2nd chapter.

Through everything, Aeldryc and his guards are continuously looking for the portal that brought Pip to Qoksmere. In the meantime, Pip is falling in love with the big Fae, and doesn’t want to go home. He has nobody waiting on him except Sky. He makes new friends in Qoksmere, most notably the queen’s seamstress, who takes Pip under her wing as an apprentice. Pip then teaches her and others how to crochet. He’s enjoying his new life away from San Jose.

There is SO much sex in this book. It’s literally all Pip thinks about, talks about, and probably dreams about. He’s not shy about it, either. He even inappropriately discusses his and Aeldryc’s sex life with the Queen, of all people. Pip has no filter, like, AT ALL. He thinks it, he blurts it out. No in between. At one point, he mentions how he wants to be taken by several men at once while Aeldryc watches.

This is where the story almost took a nosedive for me. I’m fine with couples having on page sex with others if it’s a mutual thing, and if I’m expecting it. I wasn’t. It was the first half or so of the book looking like Pip and Aeldryc were moving toward a serious, monogamous, relationship. Then Pip says something about being taken by others, and suddenly Aeldryc’s all for it and making it happen. It took me out of the story for a minute, but then it was fine. This was Pip, and it didn’t change how he and Aeldryc felt for each other. Aeldryc got off on it.

It did, however, get weird for me much later in the book when Pip and Aeldryc hooked up with a troll couple when they were out looking for Sky. They’d received a tip that he’d followed Pip through the portal. The weird part wasn’t Pip wanting to hook up with the troll couple. The weird part was watching Aeldryc kissing and sucking and taking part in all of it. Having read about him up to that point, I expected him to only participate when it came directly to Pip, not the others. It wasn’t a bad thing, just unexpected because having sex with others was mainly a Pip thing because he was obsessed with all things sex. Aerdryc was all about it as well, but he had restraint. You’d have to read the book to understand what I mean. It just seemed off.

It’s totally on me because under ‘what to expect’ in the blurb it does list MMM+. Apparently, I overlooked that when I downloaded the book. No big deal, though I felt that the couples swap scene was totally unnecessary for the story as a whole.

This was funny in a few places. There was no drama, no angst. I admit that Pip was quite annoying throughout most of the book. Having a lack of filter is one thing, but blabbing things out in front of the Queen that could get you executed is something else entirely.

“What? I need to know if she’s going to execute me for telling her Aeldryc arranged for those two guards to fuck me, and they fell in love while doing it?”

My two favorite characters in Pip and the Shadow Daddy are not Pip and Aeldryc. One is Queen Delsynarea. She’s a bit scary at first, but I really liked her toward the end. She’s a big fan of gossip, which is right up Pip’s alley. The second one is Bram, Aeldryc’s horse. Bram was very smart, and nobody could convince me that he didn’t understand every single word said to him and around him. 🙂

There’s also Periwinkle, Pip’s horse that he doesn’t know how to ride so he walks him around like a puppy on a leash.

Overall, I liked this okay, but the amount of sex was crazy much. I’m not saying sex scenes are bad, but I am saying you can have way too much of a good thing. I’d barely made it to 20% of the book before I was wanting to skim because there was so much.

The only real issue I had with the book was the lack of warning on what to expect at around the halfway mark, mentioned above. Had I expected it going in, it would’ve been okay, but I wasn’t. The same applies to the couples swap thing much later.

I loved everything about Aeldryc. Pip was… something else.

The blurb says BDSM and Dom/Daddy. Other than Pip being restrained during the group sex, and a little spanking, that’s the extent of it. He jokingly calls Aeldryc Daddy a few times, but that’s it. It didn’t really read to me as a daddy kink book, but that might just be me.

I listed ‘fated mates’ in my tags above, but in Pip and the Shadow Daddy it’s a resonant bond. Same thing, different wording.

The next book is Sky and the Grumpy Troll. Here’s hoping that Sky is able to take it down a notch, unlike Pip.

4 stars.