Beyond Shame is the first novel in the Beyond series by Kit Rocha.
Finished on: 16.10.2025

Content Note: roofies/attempted rape

Plot:
Noelle grew up sheltered and rich in Eden. But when she dared to try to have sex, she got cast out of the city and into Sector Four, one of the pretty much lawless sectors around Eden. Without money, connections or any clear idea of how the sectors work, Noelle is easy prey – and finds herself feeling woozy and being chased by a guy on the street. Luckily for her she runs right into Jasper. Jas is the right-hand man of sector ruler Dallas O’Kane and he is not here for roofies. But he is certainly here for Noelle and her apparently insatiable curiosity about her own sexuality.

I thought that I would love Beyond Shame, but it turns out I felt pretty cold about it – and that’s not the kind of reaction you want to have to a book that is full of hot sex.

I have been following Bree, one half of the Kit Rocha writing duo, for a while now and I already followed many of her recommendations for books and TV shows and enjoyed them, so I thought it was finally time to give their own books a try. When they had a sale for the entire series, I jumped at the chance and got the Beyond series knowing very little about it, except that it is kinky and dystopian.

I am no stranger to kinky reads, though there are certain kinks that really don’t work for me. From this perspective, Beyond Shame has nothing too much out there, sex-wise, though it is certainly interesting to get a culture where kink is the norm: everybody here is into BDSM, group sex, public sex and more, as well as being polyamorous and queer. (On a sidenote: If it is the norm, is it still kinky, or does kink always require a certain transgressive element?)

So, I fully expected things to be steamy, and they definitely were. The trouble is that the steam blew right past me. I was reading almost mechanically and a little bored through the sex scenes, more often than not frowning at the timeline of Noelle going from virgin to public sex within days. And I really can’t pinpoint why the smut left me so cold. It is well-written enough, and it doesn’t really include things I normally wouldn’t go for, quite to the contrary.

But maybe the trouble starts even before that. The book throws many characters at us and hints at future pairings for the series, and while I liked most of the people involved, I barely found anybody sexy, especially not the guys. Maybe I have moved completely past my alpha male phase, but I don’t think that’s really it. In theory they were all still pretty hot to me. I just didn’t feel it.

There is certainly an element here where I was overwhelmed with the sheer number of couples that get thrown at us. Another element was that sometimes I just didn’t understand the characterization of how people related to each other sometimes. Especially with Lexi and Dallas, I just didn’t get their dynamic and I felt like the book explained it to me in ways that I still couldn’t follow. For Noelle and Jas, this also happened, but it was more moments that left me confused and not their relationship as a whole.

I did love, though, that they nicely subvert the trope where one romantic lead tries to hurt or push away the other for their own good. I really wanted to give the book a standing ovation for that. Overall, I think I will at least read book two in the series because there was more than enough quality stuff here to make me hopeful that my disconnect from this one is a one-off and not indicative of the entire series for me.

Summarizing: even if it didn’t work for me, if you like kink and dystopias, why not go for it?