Raze by Roan Parrish

Sometimes the walls we build to save ourselves have to come tumbling down.

For the last ten years, Huey has built his life around his sobriety. If that means he doesn't give a damn about finding love or companionship for himself, well, it's probably better that way. After all, the last thing he wants is to hurt anyone else. Until Felix Rainey walks into his bar, fresh-faced, unbearably sweet—and, for some reason Huey can't fathom, interested in him.

As the eldest of five kids, Felix Rainey spent his childhood cooking dinner, checking homework, and working after-school jobs. Now in his twenties, he's still scrambling to make ends meet and wondering what the hell he's doing with his life. When he meets Huey, he's intimidated... and enamored. Huey's strong and confident, he owns his own business—hell, he's friends with rock stars. What could he ever see in Felix?

As Huey and Felix get closer, the spark catches and soon they can't get enough of each other. But Huey's worked hard to avoid intimacy, and Felix threatens his carefully constructed defenses. Huey realizes he needs to change if he wants to truly put his past behind him—and build a future with Felix.

Roan Parrish’s pitch-perfect Riven novels can be read together or separately.

Book 3
Buy Links

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B&N  ~  Google Play  ~  iTunes  ~  Kobo

Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team

Sarah – ☆☆☆☆
3.5 stars

This is a sweet and angsty romance. A recovering addict, Dane has spent years creating a life full of structure and routines that keep him safe. He takes care of his sponsees, but he doesn’t let anyone get close. Felix is almost Dane’s opposite. For as long as he can remember, he’s been inseparable from his younger sister. So when she lands her dream job, Felix feels abandoned and lonely. Felix and Dane meet by chance and their improbable connection is awkward, frustrating, and kinda beautiful.

I really enjoyed Dane and Felix. Both are interesting, complex characters and they are both very loveable. I found their relationship as frustrating as they did – neither man has any communication skills and there were too many moments where I wanted to bang their heads together. Both Dane and Felix are prone to moping and overanalysing everything, so much of the book is spent in the characters’ heads – very little actually happens in this story. The result is a story that feels slow and there’s probably a little bit too much snowflake angst at times for me.

There is an age gap between Dane and Felix, but they are so well matched in other areas that it didn’t feel like a thing. Felix’ existential angst feels real and familiar as does his minimum wage job and his desire for meaningful work. This isn’t my favourite book by this author and I probably preferred the first two books in the series. I’m not sure I’m quite the right demographic for this series and I’m pretty sure urban millennials will relate to Felix and Dane’s relationship better than I did.

Also Available in the Riven Series

Book 1
Buy Links

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon Au  ~  Amazon Ca
B&N  ~  Google Play  ~  iTunes  ~  Kobo

For reviews & more info, check out our Riven post.

Book 2
Buy Links

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon Au  ~  Amazon Ca
B&N  ~  Google Play  ~  iTunes  ~  Kobo

For reviews & more info, check out our Rend post.

Roan Parrish lives in Philadelphia, where she is gradually attempting to write love stories in every genre. When not writing, she can usually be found cutting her friends’ hair, meandering through whatever city she’s in while listening to torch songs and melodic death metal, or cooking overly elaborate meals. She loves bonfires, winter beaches, minor chord harmonies, and self-tattooing. One time she may or may not have baked a six-layer chocolate cake and then thrown it out the window in a fit of pique.

Connect with Roan

Facebook  ~  Twitter  ~  Instagram  ~  Website  ~  Goodreads

Reviewers on the Wicked Reads Review Team were provided a free copy of Raze (Riven #3) by Roan Parrish to read and review.

Rend by Roan Parrish

After a whirlwind romance, a man with a painful past learns to trust the musician who makes him believe in happy endings.

Matt Argento knows what it feels like to be alone. After a childhood of abandonment, he never imagined someone might love him—much less someone like Rhys Nyland, who has the voice of an angel, the looks of a god, and the worship of his fans.

Matt and Rhys come from different worlds, but when they meet, their chemistry is incendiary. Their romance is unexpected, intense, and forever—at least, that’s what their vows promise. Suddenly, Matt finds himself living a life he never thought possible: safe and secure in the arms of a man who feels like home. But when Rhys leaves to go on tour for his new album, Matt finds himself haunted by the ghosts of his past.

When Rhys returns, he finds Matt twisted by doubt. But Rhys loves Matt fiercely, and he’ll go to hell and back to triumph over Matt’s fears. After secrets are revealed and desires are confessed, Rhys and Matt must learn to trust each other if they’re going to make it. That means they have to fall in love all over again—and this time, it really will be forever.

Roan Parrish’s pitch-perfect Riven novels can be read together or separately.

Book 2
Buy Links

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon Au  ~  Amazon Ca
B&N  ~  Google Play  ~  iTunes  ~  Kobo

Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team

Sarah – ☆☆☆☆
3.5 stars

The second book in this series isn’t as much a sequel as it is a companion novel to Riven. Rend is the story of Caleb’s ex-boyfriend, Rhys, and his husband, Matt. The story moves back and forth in time, exploring Matt’s life and the effects of Matt’s traumatic childhood experiences on his adult life and his marriage to Rhys. This book doesn’t standalone and readers will need to start with Riven to fully engage with this second book.

This is a dark story. Matt is a private, secretive character who is unable to love himself and unable to trust anyone else. When Rhys goes on tour for a couple of months, Matt falls apart. This book was hard work for me. Matt isn’t a particularly likeable character and he is an emotional mess. At the end, the writer talks about working elements of Gothic fiction into the book and all I could think about was how close the writing style came to proper Gothic melodrama. Matt spends much of the story remembering and working through past traumas and current emotions. There were times the intensity of his emotions was overwhelming for me as a reader. As a foster carer, I appreciate how the writer approaches childhood trauma and attachment disorders. As a romance reader who uses fiction to escape from my kids’ trauma issues, the book is a bit too heavy and a bit too close to real life for me.

I have mixed feelings about the unconventional structure of this romance. My geeky academic side likes the concept of playing with the classic structure of a romance by starting with marriage and working backwards and forwards from the traditional romance end point. The romantic in me feels that the unconventional structure made it difficult to fully understand or properly invest in the relationship between Rhys and Matt.


Ruthie – ☆☆☆
3.5 stars

This is the second book in the series, and whilst it can be read as a standalone, I think it is better for understanding Theo and Caleb and the reason that they are important to this relationship.

Overall, I enjoyed the outcome of this book, but it was told in a way which I found highly frustrating. There are times where moving backwards during a story to explain things works, here I was not entirely sure. I also found too much inner voice, and mostly insecure inner voice. Fundamentally I think I found the whole story rather odd. Matt was so clearly in need of therapy, from the very beginning. I felt his story was well explained, and even though he had not told Rhys everything, he was still obviously a man suffering from significant issues due to his mother abandoning him as a young child. Rhys was amazingly supportive, but never seemed to understand just how damaged and in need of security his man was – his only solution was to take him to bed to show him how much he loved him. It was a tactic he repeated, and Matt asked for many times. Even if they were enjoying themselves, Matt used it too often to forget, which made it slightly uncomfortable.

By the end I did feel that their future was much more likely to be good, but for most of the book, I wanted to point out the obvious!


Erica – ☆☆☆
Rend is the sequel to Riven, but can easily be read as a standalone. However, I do recommend reading Riven first, as the characters are introduced in that novel.

During Riven, we learned Rhys and Matt are a married couple, as Caleb and Theo are put through the paces. Rhys and Caleb are best friends and past lovers, their connection runs deep, with their partners joining the circle.

The whole of Rend is simply working the kinks out of a new marriage, when obviously Matt was not ready to marry in the first place. As our narrator, Matt suffers during the entirety, finding his footing as a husband, where he fits into Rhys' life, and what he wants in the future.

Matt counsels young adults who aged-out of the foster care system, which should have fit him perfectly. Other than the fact that he wasn't stable enough to hand out advice he himself did not take. He needed a therapist. ASAP. But no one thought to suggest this, not even his adviser at work.

Matt was abandoned by his father, then his mother, then by the woman he called aunt, ageing out of the foster care system. To say the man has baggage is an understatement. Upon meeting Rhys, Matt pretends this baggage doesn't exist, only moving forward from that day forth, but the past shapes the future, infected with insecurities, lack of confidence, and a weak self-worth.

In a nutshell, Matt never felt he was good enough, gauging his worst against everyone else's best.

Told in a stream of consciousness, not in linear timelines. There were pages where events mentioned took place in the far past, the distant past, the now, and even the next day. I would be reading along in what I thought was the present, then would be thrust in something that happened the next day at work, only to have the story shift back to what I assumed was the present (the day before the work day) and this chaotic writing style continued throughout the novel.

90% TOLD, hardly anything shown happening in the now other than sex scenes. Stream of consciousness. No linear timeline. Befuddling back and forth on the same page with nothing denoting the shift in time.

I wanted to become emotionally invested in this gritty, overemotional novel, but the writing style, the way the pacing didn't organically unfold, made it difficult to connect for me. Added to the fact that I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, since they were so in love from the start to finish, but it never fell (let that be a comfort to those reading reviews prior to purchasing).

The entirety of the plot is Matt working through his baggage with Rhys nonstop reassuring him, intermixed with redundant sex scenes. Character-driven, yet the character repeats the same things on every page for 300 pages, no matter what era in time was told, where I don't see an evolution of change over time, but the change occurring with a finger-snap.

I wanted to love the novel, empathizing with Matt, while some of his pain resonated deeply within me, but the execution of the novel itself took away from the experience. While I enjoyed the beyond insta-love beginning, there was little to no plot to support 300+ pages of what felt like the reader being thrust into a therapy session not hosted by a therapist.

Honestly, if the book had been written in a linear timeline, where all those flashbacks into the beginning of their marriage fell in line with the beginning where they met, my rating would have been higher. It starts off where they met. Then they are married. The reader misses the most important parts – the journey where they fell in love. They were in love and married and we just had to believe the author because we were told, not shown. The in-between bits are shown randomly when Matt thinks of them, mixed in with actual flashbacks to his past in foster care with his foster brother. The timeline/format/release of information killed the book for me.

Recommended to fans of the author and the series. I am curious to see where else the series is headed.

Also Available in the Riven Series

Book 1
Buy Links

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon Au  ~  Amazon Ca
B&N  ~  Google Play  ~  iTunes  ~  Kobo

For reviews & more info, check out our Riven post.

Roan Parrish lives in Philadelphia, where she is gradually attempting to write love stories in every genre. When not writing, she can usually be found cutting her friends’ hair, meandering through whatever city she’s in while listening to torch songs and melodic death metal, or cooking overly elaborate meals. She loves bonfires, winter beaches, minor chord harmonies, and self-tattooing. One time she may or may not have baked a six-layer chocolate cake and then thrown it out the window in a fit of pique.

Connect with Roan

Facebook  ~  Twitter  ~  Website  ~  Goodreads
Google+  ~  Instagram

Reviewers on the Wicked Reads Review Team were provided a free copy of Roan (Riven #2) by Roan Parrish to read and review.

Riven by Roan Parrish

Two tortured musicians inspire each other to risk their hearts in this edgy and emotional novel.

Theo Decker might be the lead singer of Riven, but he hates being a rock star. The paparazzi, the endless tours, being recognized everywhere he goes—it all makes him squirm. The only thing he doesn’t hate is the music. Feeling an audience’s energy as they lose themselves in Riven’s music is a rush unlike anything else... until he meets Caleb Blake Whitman. Caleb is rough and damaged, yet his fingers on his guitar are pure poetry. And his hands on Theo? They’re all he can think about. But Caleb’s no groupie—and one night with him won’t be enough.

Just when Caleb is accepting his new life as a loner, Theo Decker slinks into it and turns his world upside-down. Theo’s sexy and brilliant and addictively vulnerable, and all Caleb wants is another hit. And another. That’s how he knows Theo’s trouble. Caleb can’t even handle performing these days. How the hell is he going to survive an affair with a tabloid superstar? But after Caleb sees the man behind the rock star, he begins to wonder if Theo might be his chance at a future he thought he’d lost forever.

Book 1
Buy Links

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon Au  ~  Amazon Ca
B&N  ~  Google Play  ~  iTunes  ~  Kobo

Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team

Erica – ☆☆☆☆
3.5 Stars

Riven is a contemporary MM romance between an older blues musician and a young, reluctant rock star, solely focusing on their character development, within their relationship with one another and within themselves.

Slow paced, with a small cast of characters, I have to be honest how it took me several days to finish the novel. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but rather because there just wasn’t much going on to ‘hook’ me. It meandered at times, causing it to feel longer than its page count. With that being said, I did truly enjoy Theo and Caleb.

Theo is all about the music and the performance, and absolutely loathes the bells and whistles. He joined a band because he wanted a sense of community, camaraderie, of family. Being the lead singer, which means he is the frontrunner who has fans clamoring for his attention, jealousy and a divide keeps Theo from connecting with his bandmates in the way he wished he could.

Caleb had a good career as a musician, but he fell into all the trappings of being a star, including drugs. It took four stints in rehab, but it was basically maturity that has Caleb struggling to stay sane and sober. I felt this characterization was dead-accurate – the fear, the worry and panic. How he wants to be with Theo but not the celebrity that follows in his wake, how he wants to create music but not the trappings.

Theo and Caleb were hot together, a lot of chemistry and tension that was a bit too instantaneous for my liking. I need to be teased, have it drawn out and make me earn it. There was lust explored at the start of the novel, and the guys kept going there as they got to know each other on a deeper level. Prude, I am not, but I have to admit I skimmed the later sex scenes due to the abundance and redundancy.

The conflict was self-created. While I understood Caleb’s fear and hesitation, the ‘push you away’ was one or two too many times in a novel, removing the emotional impact while taking it into more of a frustrating-the-reader territory, when the reader knows they will eventually get there due to the genre. Able to predict the ending, I kept thinking, “C’mon, not again!”

Theo and Caleb resonated with me on an emotional level. I appreciated their struggles and growth as the novel progressed, and their connection felt real. The music intrigued me. However, the slower pacing, lack of any real conflict, the redundancy when it came to scenes/smexy time/relationship issues, and Caleb pushing Theo away a few times too many, this had my interests waning and contemplating DNFing the novel many times over.

The ending did give me the warm and fuzzies, so I’m pleased I persevered and do believe it was worth it.


Sarah – ☆☆☆☆
This is a full on angst-fueled romance between two tortured musicians. Theo is a reluctant rock star, the front man outsider in a band that both resents and needs his musical talents. Caleb is a washed-up Blues musician struggling to stay clean and away from the lifestyle that exacerbated his addiction.

There is an immediate connection between Theo and Caleb from their first meeting. But both men carry too much emotional baggage. Relationships require trust and vulnerability and neither Theo or Caleb can do either of these things. The result is an emotionally volatile push-pull relationship that I found exhausting and often infuriating as a reader.

The music is beautiful in this book and I love the way the author almost allows us to hear it. For me, the relationship between Caleb and Theo is so volatile that both men often seem childlike. Theo’s reaction to his success comes across as petulant and ungrateful. There were times I shared the band’s dislike for Theo because his arrogance and general misery aren’t terribly attractive.

I enjoyed the quality of the writing in this story more than I enjoyed the characters or their relationship. I’m probably older than the target demographic for this story and I think I’m a little too old for Theo’s emo angst. But as always, Roan Parrish’s writing is beautiful.


Angie – ☆☆☆
I have only read a few books by this author and seems like I am always in the minority on how I feel about each book. I almost didn't make it through this one. The insta-love between Theo and Caleb would have been fine with me, along with all the sex, I love sex in my books. However, I didn't connect with Theo or Caleb. I felt like some things were said over and over again, which drove me nuts. Then some of the story just seemed like filler to make the book longer or to try to make you like it more. Even the sex couldn't keep me interested. Theo and Caleb's story just wasn't for me but I am sure others will love it.


Ruthie – ☆☆☆☆
I am a big fan of tortured rock stars who have had enough of fame and paparazzi – so this worked for me. It has to be said that Theo could have helped himself by communicating better with his band, as when he does finally they do tone their expectations down a bit.

Both Caleb and Theo clearly had an amazing talent, but not enough direction – so it was a bit frustrating at times to have them leading the story! They did, however, have wonderful chemistry, in every way, which kept the interest levels high even when their future together seemed so uncertain. The lack of supportive side characters who were integral to the story was noticeable – sure, there were both Rhys and Huey in Caleb's life, but their role seemed to be fixed around Caleb's fear of falling, rather than his chance at a clean future. And Theo really had no one except Caleb.

It was a different take on a rock star romance, and one which gave me pause for thought, and guaranteed that if I met them, we would eat out!

Roan Parrish lives in Philadelphia, where she is gradually attempting to write love stories in every genre.

When not writing, she can usually be found cutting her friends’ hair, meandering through whatever city she’s in while listening to torch songs and melodic death metal, or cooking overly elaborate meals. She loves bonfires, winter beaches, minor chord harmonies, and self-tattooing. One time she may or may not have baked a six-layer chocolate cake and then thrown it out the window in a fit of pique.

Connect with Roan

Facebook  ~  Twitter  ~  Website  ~  Goodreads
Google+  ~  Instagram

Reviewers on the Wicked Reads Review Team were provided a free copy of Riven (Riven #1) by Roan Parrish to read and review.