Rating: 👍🏻

What. A. Romp.

I found That Time I Took Down a Cult, by Rebel Carter kinda randomly while perusing books on Kindle Unlimited and immediately added it to my library to read. And I’m so glad I did.

For reference, the tl;dr is this: Buffy Martinez is about to get married, which is good because she’s spent her whole life getting ready to be married… as part of a cult. So when it turns out the whole marriage thing is code for “murder all the virgins in sacrifice to Wrath, the god we worship,” she gets mad. Which works out because Wrath, who’s actually a demon, claims her as his bride and vows to help her get revenge.

If you’re a reader who isn’t willing to suspend your disbelief indefinitely for a book, That Time I Took Down a Cult probably isn’t for you. Lore enters the story as it goes, so you never have quite all of the info about the world the book’s set in, nor the magic that abounds. Because of that, I will admit I got lost a few times. (Like how exactly did Buffy end up married to Wrath? That’s still not clear to me and I reread the beginning a few times to try and figure it out.)

I’ll also say that if you’re looking for a capital R romance where the story revolves around the characters meeting and falling in love—this isn’t that. It’s pretty instalove-y and while the physical intimacy evolves as the book progresses, the love between them doesn’t quite seem to. Which, imo, is fine, so long as you’re there for the cult revenge story and fine with the romance being a subplot.

Ultimately the thing that kept this from being an “omg I loved it” book, though, was that the pacing is inconsistent. The beginning and end are very fast-paced, but the middle just sort of drags. I actually feel like there’s at least one scene that could have been cut (the roller coaster) to move things along to the climax of the story.

All that said, this was still a really great time, and I look forward to reading more from Rebel Carter.