My Fault (Culpable, #1) by Mercedes Ron
Series: Culpable #1
Published by Bloom Books on June 6, 2023
Genres: Romance
Pages: 416
Format: eARC
Source: Netgalley
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Fast-paced and sizzling with a forbidden enemies-to-lovers romance, My Fault is the first book in Mercedes Ron's Culpable trilogy. This suspenseful YA series untangles the threads of love, trauma, and secrets, perfect for fans of Ugly Love and After.

Seventeen-year-old Noah Morgan loves her quiet, normal life in Toronto. But when her mother returns from a cruise unexpectedly married to a billionaire and announces they are moving to L.A., Noah is suddenly shoved out of her comfort zone and into a glittering world of illegal street races, lavish pool parties, and spoiled rich kids.
And her new stepbrother Nicholas is the most spoiled of them all. Arrogant, aloof, and viciously attractive, Nick is everything she hates, especially when she learns his bad boy persona isn't just a façade. She's spent her life running from danger, and Nick is danger incarnate. Yet neither of them can prevent the powerful attraction that flares between them―enough to turn their worlds upside-down and tempt them beyond all reason.

But Noah's past may be even more dangerous than their forbidden romance. And if he wants her, Nick will have to decide if he's willing to risk everything.

my thoughts:

Before reading My Fault, please check trigger warnings.

I had such high hopes for My Fault. The Amazon movie has been making its way around bookstagram and everyone has been hyping it up. I knew I shouldn’t base my expectations on that but I did anyway. I was completely let down by this one.

Nick and Noah are two of the most annoying main characters I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading about. Noah, in particular, was just bad. She was whiny, mean, and downright stupid at times. At one point, she accepts a drink from a stranger at a party and surprise, surprise, it’s drugged. That’s bad enough but she then has the nerve to blame Nick, her stepbrother, for her being drugged. He didn’t give her the drink, he didn’t tell her to drink it, he wasn’t even really interacting with her at the time of the situation. In fact, he steps in to help her. How exactly that adds up to it being his fault, I’m not sure.

This is only one of many examples of Noah making a terrible decision and then refusing to take any blame for it. Nick was an asshole and he treated Noah like shit but she needed to own up to her mistakes and stop blaming everything on him, her mother, or her mother’s decision to marry Nick’s father.

As for Nick, everyone keeps saying how badass and amazing he is but to me, he just came across as a spoiled rich boy playing at being a bad boy. He may have ruled his “gang” but that didn’t stop him from using his daddy’s money to fund his lifestyle.

I won’t go into detail about the rest of the characters but they were extremely one-dimensional and played almost no role in the story. It was pretty much just the Nick and Noah show.

The plot was pretty much non-existent. The whole story is about Nick and Noah wanting to get with each other, why they shouldn’t get with each other, and them getting with each other. That’s it. The sad part is that the spice didn’t even make up for the lack of any other redeeming factors. Nick and Noah didn’t have any chemistry and everything about their relationship was cringey.

Overall, I can’t recommend anyone waste their time with My Fault. It’s an extremely lackluster representation of the forbidden romance, stepbrother/stepsister trope. Mercedes Ron is an author I don’t think I’ll be reading in the future.

if you’d like a better example of forbidden romance, you might like:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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