🪩😈🪩😈🪩
5/5
“It’s easy for women to feel shame about sex. We’re good at feeling dirty for things that should be natural.”
The Saints are the rich kids with too much money and too little respect. Those from The Swamp are born on the wrong side of the tracks, with too much aggression and not enough money.
Clay Collins is a Saint and the classic mean girl; popular, team captain and always gets her own way. Olivia Jaeger is a Swamp; the bold brunette with too many brothers to count and a dream that seems just out of reach. But Olivia is bold and already out making her a target for the closeted Clay who could never dream of being that brave.
💋🏳️🌈🥍
Douglas is the queen of dark bully romance and with Tryst Six Venom she explored the world of F/F with fearlessness and fervour.
The bullying within this novel is harsh and would likely make some people uncomfortable, but you don’t go into a Penelope Douglas novel thinking of unicorns and rainbows.
And although the bullying mainly comes from Clay, due to the fact that Olivia is a strong-willed, confident character the power wasn’t always in Clay’s hands and that was intriguing to see.
When you delve further into the story and learn of the girls’ histories you discover they’ve both known loss and suffering but what makes them so different is that Olivia managed to learn from her pain whereas Clay is still struggling.
The way Douglas handled Olivia already being out and Clay’s worries around being discovered is a powerful and honest look at being gay and a girl in today’s society. The assumptions Olivia’s deals with on a daily basis and the anxiety Clay has over being outed.
Amongst the bullying, drama and toxicity is the heat and Tryst Six Venom is truly a sapphic smut paradise. Both Olivia and Clay are brimming with desire and mixed with their constant angst this lends itself to heat-fuelled dirt that’ll have you desperate for more.
It’s enemies to lovers, bully romance and contemporary fiction rolled into a modern lesbian Montague vs Capulet story – without all the death, a tad more tormenting and a hell of a lot more sex.
🌈For fans of Punk 57 and One Last Stop🌈
Emily xo
Emily Vierke 