Binding Rose Book Review

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In this post I’m sharing my Binding Rose book review. Binding Rose is a part of the Mafia Wars series where multiple authors wrote stand alone books based around the same families. Binding Rose is by Ivy Fox and is the first book in the series.

“It’s because of Rosa and the other sacrificial families’ daughters that there was a ceasefire in the Mafia Wars, after all. But peace is a tenuous, brittle thing.” 

Ivy Fox, Binding Rose

This book is a mafia romance reverse harem which means the main female character will end up with multiple romantic interests in a poly relationship. If you are not interested in this type of romance you may want to move on to the next book.

Trigger Warnings

Since we don’t always get trigger warnings on books I like to give trigger warnings in my reviews. This can help people avoid certain triggers that could hurt their mental well being.

Possible Triggers in this book are:

• Alcohol
• Attempted Murder
• Blood
• Death
• Depression
• Drugs
• Fire
• Murder
• Pregnancy
• Profanity
• Religion
• Sexually Explicit Scenes
• Suicide
• Torture
• Violence

For a list of the triggers I look for you can check out this link here. This may or may not be a complete list of triggers for this book, I do my best to make sure I mark anything that could be a potential trigger but I may accidentally miss triggers.

Binding Rose Synopsis

In order to stop the Mafia Wars each of the six families will give their daughter to be married to another family binding each family together in peace. Rosa of the Cartel is to be married to Tiernan, the boss of the Irish Mafia in Boston. Neither party is happy with the idea of the marriage but Rosa will find a way to do her duty to the peace treaty. Tiernan has other ideas on what that will look like and recruits Shay, his brother, and Colin, his cousin, to fulfill the duties of the treaty. 

Ivy Fox did a fantastic job with bringing these characters to life. She shows us that not all monsters are scary and sometimes they will protect us with everything they have. I loved the characters in this book.

Binding Rose Reading Experience

I loved the characters in Binding Rose, but I wanted more from them. I could have felt these characters on a much deeper level but the build up to these characters falling in love wasn’t really there like I had hoped it would be.

While we got a little of that from Tiernan, I do feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities to give us more. That being said, I think the story and characters were still good.

The book is 462 pages and took me about 6 hours to read. I did not really put this book down but to sleep and get some work done. So even though I didn’t feel a wide range of emotions, the story was entertaining enough that I wanted to keep reading.

Finally, I did not care for some of the formatting and word choices in this book. There were a lot of long paragraphs that caused me to start skimming through. I would have liked to see 5 or 6 sentences at most in a paragraph. 

As far as word choices go, for the most part it was ok but the moment I see “quivering member” I go straight to 10 Things I Hate About You. It’s just not the description for me. There were a couple of others but with word choice I can usually just power through it.

Now mind you, I am still in a bit of an emotional funk, and I might be dead inside right now. So I’m sharing my thoughts initially, most of the time I try to give myself a couple of days to think about it before I write a review. Sadly I don’t have a couple of days to do that. I have a lot of books I want to read through this month, so I’ll be needing to read and write the reviews quickly.

Binding Rose Book Review

As usual I will focus on the characters, then the setting, and finally give some of my overall thoughts.

First up is Rosa. I love Rosa. However, there is no way that we could be friends in real life, we would clash. I admire Rosa a lot, just because our personalities would absolutely clash, doesn’t mean I don’t love her and want her to have her best life ever.

Tiernan does dirty talk like no other, but he’s an asshole, who stops being an asshole. Shay is perfect, he’s the death you don’t see coming while also being incredibly kind. He’s the type of guy who would love aftercare. Colin, I would let Colin steal a Monet for me. He’s quiet but incredibly protective.

Most of this book is set in Boston and outside of Rosa’s comments about it being gray I wished we would have gotten more. All descriptions were brief so I wish we had gotten a little more description in the setting department.

Like I said previously, I loved the characters in this book though I wish we would have gotten a bit more from them. Some of the supporting characters were really good and the story had a good happy ending. I did enjoy this.

Star Rating

Before I rate this book I want to give you a bit of background about what my rankings mean. I typically read books that I check out through the Libby app with my local library or through Kindle Unlimited. 

I rarely buy ebooks unless they are cheaply priced or on sale. I also very rarely buy physical copies of books. I’m a bit of a minimalist so I have to absolutely adore a book to buy a physical copy that will be proudly displayed in my home.

So my ranking system is as follows:

• 5 Stars equals I am buying a physical copy of this book. I will read this book at least 10 more times, it is the best ever.
• 4 stars equals a great book. I might buy an ebook version when it’s on sale so that I can re-read it at least one more time.
• 3 stars equals a good book. I likely won’t read again but I appreciate the story.
• 2 stars equals “Meh.” I will not read this book again, it had a lot of problems and I did not care for it.
• 1 star equals a bad book. I barely finished this book and I will never recommend anyone waste valuable book reading time on this book.
• 0 stars is a did not finish book. I will never finish that book and it is banished.

Binding Rose gets 3 stars and 3 peppers. It was good, I likely won’t read the book again but I appreciated the story. I felt the characters were good and I thought the story was good. It felt rushed and there could have been a lot more with the characters.

Final Thoughts on Binding Rose

I plan on reading every book in the Mafia Wars series. I like the concept and I like how we get different authors telling different stories. Binding Rose was a good start to the story though the series doesn’t really need to be read in order. I really can’t wait to read Blade of Iris which is the last book in the series.

Click the link to read my Forget Me Not Bombshell book review.

Have you read Binding Rose or any of the Mafia Wars books? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Follow me on TikTok and Pinterest for more like this and pin this to your favorite book boards.

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