REVIEW WILL BE PUBLIC ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND GOODREADS MARCH 12TH

This book will not be for everyone. It is dark. It is confronting and it has some pretty dark and twisted undertones. **POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING**

Never Contented Things tells the story of Ksenia, Josh and Lexi from each of their point of views alternating between their voices throughout the book.

Ksenia and Josh are foster siblings with a borderline incestuous relationship that only isn't based on the ideal that they're not blood relations. This makes the beginning of the book very uncomfortable and the dialogue can get incredibly cliche.

Josh is a flamboyant, polygamous character that starts off very self assured (and obsessed with Ksenia)

Ksenia is an alternatively elegant, androgynous, pansexual girl that starts off broken after being abandoned by her drug addict mother, who lied about who her father was and resulted in Ksenia going into foster care where she was raped by her previous foster brother and the rape covered up by her then foster parents who blamed her, protected their rapist son and kicked her out.

Ksenia and Josh form an intense bond that then morphs into something truly terrifying and ugly after Josh is kidnapped and Ksenia becomes the prime suspect of his murder. Until she commits suicide and dies in their arms of their mutual best friend Lexi. Or so some think.

The truth is far more disturbing and a twisted tale of obsession, love, magic, consent, betrayal and friendship.

This book was almost a DNF but I pushed past the initial discomfort and ended up really enjoying this book.

This book is certainly NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED but... 75% of the book is masterfully written, drip feeding us information about our plot and characters and building gradually until reaching a terrifying crescendo and the shattering everything into pieces again.

This book will make you assess who you really are and what makes you human. How many pieces of a person make up their identity and how fluid that sense of self can be and how others can tamper with that.

Overall I would recommend this if you can stomach horror and thriller books because I've seen other reviews have been too disturbed to read this. Dark and twisted is sort of my niche so I could relate to a lot of the content without being triggered but others may not feel the same.

Hol-eeee cow. I don't think I've ever put down a book as fast as this one.

I was a little weirded out by the romance factor between the protagonist and her younger foster brother, especially when he crawled into bed with her and prompted this conversation:

"No, baby, it would be wrong. You're younger....besides, we're basically brother and sister. Incest is frowned upon."
"What about when I'm eighteen?" he'd ask.
...."Maybe when you're twenty-one," I'd finally told him.
..."Oho! So you're saying it won't be incest anymore, once I'm twenty-one?"
"It won't be incest anymore, once you don't need me to take care of you."

Ooooohhhh boy. I think this might be the creepiest dialogue I've ever read in any YA book? For like, so many reasons. Like, maybe don't call your brother-lover 'baby' when he's in bed with you, feeling you up? And also, it won't be incest anymore once you're not a caretaker?! THAT'S NOW HOW INCEST WORKS.

But okay, soldier on, I told myself. Every book has its bumpy moments, and we're still just in the beginning here, and this is an arc, maybe it's still finding it's stride, give it a little more time. And then I ran into this description a few pages later and literally set the book down in shock.

"Sometime on the third afternoon, Josh's friend Derrick corned me outside a gas station bathroom. A lanky redhead with the all-American face you'd expect above an assault rifle: a perfect face for shooting up malls."

We live in a day and age when there are mass shootings regularly on the news, new victims and violence every month. And this is the casual way a character is described, as if 'public shooter' is an archetypical profile along the lines of a mustachioed villain tying women to railroad tracks and not a current, living nightmare that schools have to train for now, that rips people apart, that could happen anywhere, be anyone. Holy...okay.

The fact that the author thought this was an okay way to describe a character, when in fact public shooters are often born from mental illness and bullying, and this perpetuates judging others by their looks and continues to feed into the problem - I realize it is just one line, but at this point my discomfort level reached a record high and I had to stop. DNF at 7%.

Hello, my review will go up on my Instagram, blog, and Goodreads on March 6th, 2019. The review will also be added to Amazon and Barnes & Noble on the book's publication date. Links to reviews will be added when they are public, thank you.

Title: Never-Contented Things
Author: Sarah Porter
Publication Date: March 19th, 2019
Rating: 1 star
eARC provided by publisher through NetGalley

Never-Contented Things follows foster-siblings Josh and Ksenia as they become entangled with fairies and find out that their gifts come with a price.

I had a few expectations going into this book because the synopsis mentioned fairies but what I read didn't add up to anything I could have ever imagined and it got weird quick.

The weirdest, most uncomfortable part was the relationship between Josh and Ksenia. Of course, they aren't actually siblings but she puts herself in a caregiver role so it just doesn't seem right. Also, the word baby in this book was used one too many times and was very cringey.

Even if their relationship was not part of the book I didn't like any of the characters. They were flat and Josh was rather annoying. I also thought that Prince would have a much larger role in the story than he did. There was enchantments at work but he was more of a behind-the-scenes guy as were a majority of the fairies. I wanted more fairies and a fairy world but the reality they were in was basically another version of the not siblings house.

Overall, I didn't like this book for many reasons. This is one you have to go in with no expectations and probably without reading the synopsis. I hope others have more success with liking it because there are some great concepts but the execution was not there.

This was a pretty interesting book. I did like all the characters and I will say the chapter titles are really interesting.