#ASeriesAMonth2018: Briarwood Academy by Ilsa Madden-Mills

Looks like I got two series under my belt for this month. I came across Isla Madden-Mills from Kindle Unlimited. I read a few of her books for my Kindle Unlimited series and I pretty much adored them.

This series isn’t much different.

The first book is Very Bad Things…

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This book was heart wrenching. Nora is a fantastic character that has dealt with so much in her short 18 years. Her privileged lifestyle made so many people see her as a pretty little rich girl, but her life experiences were absolutely heart breaking to read about.

I thought this book was a little dramatic at times, but at the same time it really fit Nora’s character. Her relationship with Leo was a little weird at the beginning and didn’t really make you feel like this was a sweet romance. It certainly wasn’t. It was kind of rough and raw, but I really felt that the two characters were good for each other.

And as always, those HEA epilogues make my life.4 Stars


I also read the prequel novella to the second novel which was pretty good to read as well.

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5 Stars
Man, these back stories are kind of dark as fuck.

I loved Dovey and how determined she was. She didn’t want to be anything like her mother and did everything she could to avoid it. Her love for Sarah was so sweet and I’m so happy they had each other. I really enjoyed how the author incorporated Alzheimer’s into the story and I loved how Dovey questioned Sarah every morning to help her with her memory.

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I really enjoyed this book and I loved seeing more about Cuba. He was originally just a giant jerk face, but a big part of this series seems to be showing that people have multiple sides. I ended up really loving Cuba. He was a super sweet, loving guy.

The whole creepy, almost incest thing with Dovey’s father was a disgusting part of the novel and made me hate Alexander more than anything. This book got dark fast, and stayed pretty dark. I loved that there was a HEA though!

4 Stars

The final book in this series is essentially the same as the first two.

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Which kind of sucks because it was Sebastian’s story and I fucking loved him in the first two novels. I know this one is supposed to be set a couple years after, but his personality just changed completely. He didn’t feel like Leo’s little brother to me.

Also, dah fuck was that epilogue?

I don’t know if the author just tried to tie up all loose ends, but it was just kind of stupid. Seriously, the main antagonist decided to go join a convent and shave her head? She was a prissy 33 year old ex-movie star. I highly doubt she would ever do something like that.

If you want to read this series, I highly recommend breaking them up and reading books in between, at least that way you can kind of ignore the same pattern that happens with every single books.

Not quite how I wanted to end this series review, but there it is.

3 Stars


Any suggestions for other series for me to read this year? Let me know in the comments below. I’m looking mostly for NA contemporary or YA paranormal romances, but hit me up with your suggestions!

Until next time, Book worms,

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