Noctıcadıa

“No one touched what belonged to me without repercussions. My class. My requirements. My student. Without a doubt, Lilia Vespertine was going to be a massive headache. But she was my headache.”

The story follows Lilia Vespertine (very cool name, by the way), who lost her mother four years ago. However, what she remembers about her mother's death contradicts the autopsy report, making Lilia doubt herself and question whether she's been experiencing hallucinations. Despite researching the mysterious black worms that she remembers killing her mother, she can't find any evidence that they exist 😮😮

Still, Lilia refuses to give up and decides to study medicine in the hope of finding answers. During one of her assignments, she writes about these mysterious worms, only to discover that they actually exist, although very few people know about them. Her work earns her a full scholarship to the only university where they are being researched. Naturally, she accepts, and we find ourselves at Dracadia University, where the story unfolds.

This was traumatizing 😨😨 I'd seen nothing but good things about this book, and I was so excited to finally read it, only to be let down immensely. How this book has so many highly rated reviews is a mystery to me, but hey, reading is subjective. So, let's move on.

This entire book is one big waste of potential 🤷🤷 It could have been so good, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The atmosphere was amazing, the worms were creepy and deeply uncomfortable to read about 🤢🤢, and the book captured those gothic, dark academia vibes perfectly. The events that took place during the last 150 pages or so were also surprisingly entertaining, especially compared to everything that came before. And that was pretty much it. Everything else just pissed me off.

For a book that's almost 700 pages long, nothing truly happens until the very end. It started off really well, but once Lilia met our MMC, Devryck Bramwell, aka Dr. Death, the story decided to throw anything remotely interesting out the window and replace it with a deeply disturbing and childish romance between a professor and his student 🤮🤮

I'm so sorry to everyone who's obsessed with their love story, but these two irritated me to no end. Devryck is a manchild who is supposed to be this hot, secretive, dangerous man we're meant to fall in love with, when in reality, he's anything but that 😑😑

“You’re a sickness inside of me that begs never to be cured. Infecting me with this unshakable craving for things I shouldn’t want.”

The way he talks—hell, the way both of them talk—is so unnecessarily poetic that it genuinely irked me. I understand that books tend to have a more elaborate style of dialogue, but the things these two say to each other are just painfully cringeworthy. I honestly couldn't imagine saying any of those things to another human being 😖😖

(Spoiler Warning) Devryck repeatedly saying "Impervious" to calm his supposedly dead-but-apparently-not brother after a lifetime of torture and brainwashing was just ridiculous 😅😅 As if simply repeating one word could undo years of conditioning. It felt like an incredibly shallow resolution to something that should have required far more emotional depth and effort.

Lilia was just as bad. She's a snarky brat who seems to think the world revolves around her and her problems 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️ She claims she doesn't like judging people before getting to know them personally, rather than blindly believing the rumors about them. Yet, the way she behaves makes her come across as someone who thinks she's above everyone else, rather than someone who is genuinely non-judgmental 🙄🙄

She spends the entire book complaining about being poor and broke while judging those around her for coming from wealthy families. I get it. Being poor sucks, and yes, wealthy people have different problems from yours. But constantly whining about it isn't going to change a thing 😤😤

And honestly, given her judgmental attitude, I can't help thinking that if she'd grown up wealthy herself, she'd probably have turned out even worse than the people she criticizes.

Don't even get me started on the way she decides to make money 🤬🤬 Long story short, she starts making erotic videos for a site similar to OnlyFans. Our supposedly brilliant protagonist then decides that the perfect time and place to record one of these videos is during Professor Bramwell's class. This was the exact moment when whatever little hope I had left completely died 😑😑

Bramwell calls her a "newly minted adolescent" and then proceeds to sleep with her anyway 🤮🤮 The professor-student dynamic is already a difficult one to write convincingly, and this book fails miserably at it. I don't think I need to explain why.

The side characters were just as bland as the main ones. Although the book finally introduced some action towards the end, everything felt extremely rushed. The messages between Lilia and her little sister, whom I haven't even mentioned until now, were downright disgusting. But I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree 😕😕

I could go on and on complaining about this book, but honestly, it isn't worth any more of my time. I didn't like it at all, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. See you in the review of a better book 👋👋