Credence
Penelope Douglas
Publisher: Self-published
Publication date: Jan 13, 2020
Genre: New Adult Taboo Romance
Rating:
Tiernan de Haas doesn’t care about anything anymore. The only child of a film producer and his starlet wife, she’s grown up with wealth and privilege but not love or guidance. Shipped off to boarding schools from an early age, it was still impossible to escape the loneliness and carve out a life of her own. The shadow of her parents’ fame followed her everywhere.
And when they suddenly pass away, she knows she should be devastated. But has anything really changed? She’s always been alone, hasn’t she?
Jake Van der Berg, her father’s stepbrother and her only living relative, assumes guardianship of Tiernan who is still two months shy of eighteen. Sent to live with him and his two sons, Noah and Kaleb, in the mountains of Colorado, Tiernan soon learns that these men now have a say in what she chooses to care and not care about anymore. As the three of them take her under their wing, teach her to work and survive in the remote woods far away from the rest of the world, she slowly finds her place among them.
And as a part of them.
She also realizes that lines blur and rules become easy to break when no one else is watching.
One of them has her.
The other one wants her.
But he…
He’s going to keep her.
My thoughts…
I’m sorry, but what in the WHAT did I just read?!
I knew this was going to be taboo… it’s Penelope Douglas after all. I knew it was going to be twisted. However, I did not expect THAT. I mean, I know… I KNOW… just reading the synopsis says it all but I thought surely that’s just the juicy worm baiting us to read the book. Only… it’s not… and I’m left not overly sure about this whole thing.
I understand Tiernan’s hang up. Her parents were SUPER famous and in love. So in love that when they had a baby, it cramped their style. It took away from their time together. So, they pawned the spawn off to all the nannies and establishments that they could so that they could continue in their own love bubble. Tiernan grew up in a loveless home, and not the kind of home that is abusive or throws insults at you. I kind of feel like hers may have been worse because they just flat out ignored her like she wasn’t there. Even in the room trying to talk to them, they would look over her and act as if she wasn’t in the room. So, that is going to do something to your mental development. The people who are supposed to love and nurture you act like you don’t even exist. So, of course when her parents die via murder suicide and she’s sent off to her estranged step-uncle’s house up in the remote mountains, of course she’s going to latch onto any crumb of attention given to her. Uncle Jake smiles at you? Your step-cousin gives you a hug? Well, surely that means they are hot for you and you need to push that booty out and back that thing up right onto their laps. I kid you not… she was like a cat in heat. Anyone who showed ANY semblance of attention or affection, automatically got her nether regions tingly. But, for her it made sense. She was starving for any sort of affection she could get and her signals and responses were all messed up because she didn’t have a normal loving upbringing.
With the cousins, I could kind of see it. They haven’t heard anything good about their dad’s estranged step-brother. As soon as their dad could leave the house he grew up in, he was out of there and never looked back. So there are no updates about that side of the family. So when daddy Jake shows up with a teenage girl in the truck, they get excited… in all the wrong places. However, they are still young themselves late teens to early twenties. Old enough to know better, but still maturing nonetheless.
HOWEVER… Uncle Jake…. I just, my head can’t wrap around that one. He is a grown ass man, and he has been charged with caring for his step-brother’s daughter until she turns 18 in a handful of weeks. It doesn’t matter that he hates his dead step-brother, she’s still viewed as his niece AND a girl who isn’t even an adult. You know what he sees? Revenge on his step-brother… or his brother giving her to him as an apology for the screwed up stuff he did to Jack. Either way, neither reason works for me. And sure… SUUUURRRRE he waited until she turned 18, but again… gross on so many levels.
Like I said, Tiernan I can understand, but the men in the house I did not understand. She was hopping from bed to bed in that house and everyone was ok with it as long as they got a turn. Then, the author wants to throw in that one of them caught legit feelings for her and the other two relatives just say “Ok” and back off immediately. The whole thing left me so confused and ragey that this book is going to stick with me for a while, and I guess at the end of the day it means the author won, right? Because, if I’m this amped up over her book, then clearly she did her job in provoking emotion from a reader. And let’s be real, Penelope Douglas is a great writer, and I will continue to read her work, because it’s engaging and brings out emotion, but this one… I just wish the uncle was left out of it because that just creeped me out AND I felt like it didn’t make sense for his character.
