Five Brothers
by Penelope Douglas
Blurb:
On the other side of town, in the dark glades, under the rain…
Macon is the oldest. Thirty-one. Ex-Marine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile.
Army is twenty-eight. A single dad with the most beautiful green eyes. He has no idea who he is, if not a Jaeger brother.
Iron will be in prison soon. You’d never think it to meet him. He’s a nice guy, actually. But he can’t stop reacting to everything.
Dallas is the one I hate. Twenty-one, cruel, and selfish. He takes and then throws away whatever’s left.
And Trace is mine. Or he was for about two seconds. No one can tame him for long.
Not that I ever wanted to. It was fun, but now I need to go home. Back to my side of the tracks. Away from the swamps and these men. To my parents’ big house. On my clean street. Where I’m never dirty or messy or hot. And I will. I’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning. I just want to crash on the couch tonight.
Their house is dark and quiet, everyone else is asleep. Except for one. He sees me crying and comes at me from behind. I let him wrap his arms around my body and hold me tightly. His breath is on my neck, his fingers are in my hair, and he doesn’t stop there.
I don’t think it was Trace.
My Review:
There are a few things I need when I
pick up a book, and at the very top of that list is this: hook me immediately. If I feel like I have
to push myself through the first few chapters, I’m out. I want to fall into a
story the second I open it, no effort required, especially with my ADHD. So
going into this book, having only read three Penelope Douglas novels before, I
genuinely felt like it was a coin toss. I could either love it… or DNF it hard.
Five
Brothers wasted absolutely no time.
The opening was so intense it genuinely made my
stomach drop, I thought I might feel sick. But then the story shifted, took
shape, and forced me to take a steadying breath before plunging straight back
in. Once it had its grip on me, there was no escape.
If there is one thing Penelope Douglas is going
to do every single time, it’s write immaculate intimacy. The kind that leaves
you breathless. The kind that makes you ache for fictional touch and crave
these characters like they’re real. Her scenes aren’t just sexy, they’re yearning, and that alone is enough reason to
pick up her books.
She’s often labeled the “taboo queen,” and
honestly? This book proves exactly why. But what people tend to miss is that
her stories aren’t just shock value. There are layers here. When you peel them
back, everything connects in a way that feels disturbingly real. You’ll
question the characters’ choices. You’ll wonder, Is this even possible? And then the trauma cracks open, and
you realize something uncomfortable: when people are shaped by pain like this,
they don’t always make good or logical decisions. And yes, things like this do happen in real life. More often than we’d
like to believe.
This book is absolutely not for everyone. But
if you understand that life doesn’t follow neat paths, that rock bottom exists,
and that survival sometimes looks messy and morally gray, this one might hit
you hard.
The cast of characters is stacked, and you
will fall in love with more than one of them. But Macon? Macon destroyed me. His story was raw,
passionate, and devastating. You could feel his pain bleeding off the page, and
it hurt to read in the best way.
Honestly, if all of this doesn’t convince you
to pick up this book… I don’t know what will.
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