Is Toad By Katherine Dunn Worth Reading?

For one year, I believed Matteo De Luca had truly fallen in love with me. Our marriage began as an alliance, but he held me every night, kissed me before council meetings, and fastened the De Luca Donna brooch at my throat as if I already belonged beside him. Then his first love, Vanessa Ashford, came back. Within days, our official ceremony was postponed, her access was added to the Donna wing, and Matteo stopped wearing the family signet he once used to claim me in public. He said it was council business. But council business did not leave amber perfume on his skin. It did not sit beside him on a private jet to Palm Beach. And it certainly did not smile from the Donna’s chair while his friends watched me lose my place. The final humiliation came at a private dinner, when someone asked whether I was Matteo’s wife. He looked at me, then said calmly, “Elena and I have an arrangement.” That night, I stopped waiting to be chosen. Matteo could keep his first love, his title, and the home he let her enter. I packed my passport, my Florence contract, and the prenatal report he had never seen. Then I left New York with his child.

In my previous life, my husband Kael Drayne, heir to the Beast King's throne and full-blooded dragon, cut open my belly with his own hands on the day I gave birth. He pulled our child out and dashed it against the floor in front of me. That was the moment I finally understood. The one he truly loved was my stepsister, Ivy Wren. Because she couldn't bear to watch the man she loved marry someone else, Ivy had staged a dramatic exit on our wedding day, slipping out alone, only to run into a gang of rogue beastkin. She vanished without a trace. Kael blamed every last bit of it on me. He hated me for it with everything he had. "Just because you're the only pure-blooded white wolf, you think you had the right to come between me and Ivy? She's gone because of you. I'm going to throw you to the horde — let you feel exactly what she went through." But he was the one who'd pursued me. He was the one who'd confessed his feelings. It was because I chose him that he was able to claim the throne at all. None of it mattered to him. There was nothing left in his eyes but hatred. Kael hurled me into a frenzied beast horde, and I was torn apart. In those final moments, I saw three figures, Kael's three unremarkable bastard brothers, charging toward me through the chaos, trying to drag me out. But the numbers were too great, the gap in power too wide. In the end, they died there alongside me. I thought my story ended there, full of regret. Then I woke up. I'd been reborn to just before Kael and I were to marry. This time, I wasn't going to choose him. And that, apparently, drove him out of his mind.

I was the broke scholarship kid, stuck sharing a room with Sherry, the spoiled heiress. From day one, she was all fake smiles and "let's be besties." She'd take me out for fancy meals. She even introduced me to Kenneth—her rich childhood buddy. It was fine—until Kenneth and I started dating. That's when the claws came out. One day, she "accidentally" dumped hot soup all over herself and claimed I'd done it on purpose. Then she demanded I pay her back. I gave her every cent I had, but it wasn't enough. Next, she accused me of stealing her wallet. The school bought it. I got written up, everyone turned on me, and Kenneth? He dumped me with, "You're just an ugly duckling trying to be a swan." I couldn't fight back. Humiliated, alone, and dragged through online hate, I dropped out. Then I let the river take me. And then—I woke up. Back to the moment Sherry introduced me to Kenneth.

Kath was a weak werewolf, often bullied and scorned as a curse to her pack. The most painful moment in her life came when her fated mate Alpha Zach got engaged to her own sister, Keona. Desperate, Kath begged Zach to love her by force, but he cruelly rejected her. Until one fateful full moon night after his engagement celebration with Keona Zach marked Kath and took her as his. Her heart shattered beyond repair. In her anguish, Kath tried to stop their wedding, but Zach rejected her completely and cast her out of the pack. Never in her darkest dreams did she imagine she would leave carrying three tiny lives within her. Would Alpha Zach one day fall to his knees before his true mate… and regret everything?

Betrayed by the men she loved and sentenced to death, Luna Nara Moonlit’s story should have ended in blood and heartbreak. But when fate grants her a second chance, she vows to escape the chains of her past—and the mates who destroyed her. Enter Silas NightCrow: rogue Alpha, self-made, dangerous. In a world where mate bonds are unbreakable and power means everything, Silas offers Nara a different kind of alliance—one forged by choice, not destiny. With enemies closing in and her former mates desperate to reclaim her, Nara must decide if she can trust the only man who never betrayed her—or if love, in any form, is too dangerous to risk again.

AristocratsImmortals that protecting humans from dangerous elements lurking everywhere.DukeA powerful immortal that protects aristocrats' existence and humans from danger.But the Duke has his own secret: a child.No one expected him to have one, being alone and reserved. Only his loyal servant, and few trusted aristocrats knows about her existence.And she's only one who can help his father from their dilemma for millennia.