Book Review: These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong...broke me in ways I never thought a book would. I thought that this was a nice, cute story about Juliette and Roma being all cute and stuff, BUT NO. Throw in a monster, and OH HELLO Y’ALL. This book immediately sucked me in the moment I read the first line in the book-In glittering Shanghai, a monster awakens. If that sentence doesn’t pull you in, I don’t know what will.

This fantastic book is about two gangs-The Scarlet Gang, ran by the Cai family, and the White Flowers, ran by the Montagov family. A madness is going around Shanghai, and it’s affecting the gangs, and both Juliette and Roma work together to stop all of this...if one can stop trying to pull out guns and knives at one another, this would be a perfect book. But nope. Add in the communists, a monster, a French gentleman who reminds me WAY TOO MUCH of Dex Dexter from Dynasty, and you have one hell of a story.

I loved the action so much in this book, and the monster and how it seemed like the Communist Zhang Gutai was behind it all. I honestly believed that it was him after all, summoning the monster to get rid of nearly half the workers and the gangsters on both sides-but at the end, they were wrong. So, so wrong. It wasn’t Zhang Gutai like they thought.

No, no, no.

It was actually his assistant, Mr. Qi Ren, who turned into the monster and sent out all those bugs after everyone-and I think he was controlled by Paul Dexter, that scheming son of a gun. But the shocker was the truth about what happened at that bombing with Juliette’s Nurse, and then Juliette getting her revenge on the White Flowers by telling them where Lady Montagova was. BUT WHEN JULIETTE SHOT MARSHALL...I went “Juliette WHY” and thought he was dead, but then it was all a rouse to show her cousin, Tyler (whomst I hate with a passion), but at least Marshall is okay.

BUT THE SIDE CHARACTERS. Kathleen, Benedikt and Marshall, Alisa, Tyler-ALL OF THEM WERE SO, SO GOOD. They were so fleshed out that I liked and loved all of them-all except Tyler, he can go to hell. And the secrets that came out...OMG. I was hanging on to my seat while reading them. I give this book a five out of five stars because of how good it really is. A Romeo and Juliet retelling? Sign me up PLEASE.

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