Indecent is a prequel novel to the Eisha’s Hidden Codices series by Gwin Savage.
Finished on: 23.6.2025
[I won this book in a LibraryThing Early Reviewer give-away.]

Content Note: sexualized assault/attempted rape, torture [more detailed CNs at the beginning of the book itself]

Plot:
Evie is a vampire. In the United Kinavrrea Realm, this not only means that she loves women, but also social ostracization and shame for her family. Her father sends her off to Spurnwater academy, a reform school that tries to find places for vampires as servants to rich households. At Spurnwater, Evie finds new connections in fellow students, especially Rion, but also meets a troubling woman from her past again, Gymma,the woman who broke her heart

Indecent is set in an interesting world with promising characters,but parts of it remained underexplored for me. The pacing doesn’t quite come together, and the balance between the throuple to be is off. I wanted to like it more than I did.

I like vampire stories, and I found the premise here interesting: women randomly turn into vampires (or mages) on their 18th birthday, the only indication that it might happen being whether they are sapphic or not. (Sidenote: the book doesn’t touch on bisexuality, so I don’t know if you’d need to be exclusively attracted to women to be a vampire. It also doesn’t touch on whether you can be into women as a woman and not be magical somehow. And non-binary folk are not mentioned either. Maybe this is explored later on in the series, I’d definitely hope so.) I also liked that the book explores how different cultures treat this fact differently, that some are discrimnatory while others are not.

I also appreciate polyamory stories and why choose narratives, it speaks both to my bisexual heart that has difficulty deciding and my love for everything that questions heteronormativity. So, that was another point in the book’s favor.

Unfortunately, other parts didn’t work quite so well for me. For one, dark romance is not so much my genre, and this book has elements of that. I can live with it, but not when it means that one of the protagonists tortures another, stopping just shy of sexualized violence – when the two of them are the main couple.

And yes, even though this is a throuple story, I am using main couple for a reason: Gymma and Evie are given so much more time, depth and thought that Rion that the throuple feels completely off-balance. Rion is more like a bonus to the Gymma and Evie show, always amenable, available and understanding. Rion doesn’t get a point of view-chapter like the other two, she is (logically) not present in the flashback chapters that explores Evie’s and Gymma’s relationship before they meet again and that take up a large part of the book and we barely learn anything about her. During the big emotional climax, Rion withdraws politely while Evie and Gymma hash things out. That Rion is Black makes it feel even iffier (Evie is white, Gymma Asian, as far as I could tell from the descriptions, it’s always a little difficult with race in a fantasy setting).

The sex scenes are not badly written, but I lacked a certain emotional investment in them and the characters, so I found myself skimming over them. They slowed the plot down more than explore the characters. Especially since a lot of character exploration is done by Gymma explaining Evie to herself – and vice versa. This could have been the sex scenes instead.

The pacing was generally a little uneven, some things happening to suddenly, others dragging on. All in all, Indecent read like a first book (it might be, as far as I can tell it’s Savage’s first publshed book) that would have needed a little more experienced editing. It was not completely bad, far from it, but it had more potential. Ultimately, though, it didn’t hook me enough for me to stick around to see how things develop further.

Summarizing: bumpy and not enough my cup of tea.