The Line Between Obsession and Love has Disappeared

The world has changed. Any rules that might’ve been in place before the Scorpius bacterium ripped through civilization and decreased its population are no longer in place. Obsession and survival are the new reality.

So, Marcus Knight, after a hellish time in captivity that stole most of his memory and all of his soul, has one focus, and that’s keeping Dr. Penelope Kim safe in the aftermath. She’d risked her life to save him once, and she’s all that matters. For months, he’s kept his distance, protecting her from afar, because he knows that one touch—one sigh—one kiss—from her will never be enough.

Passion is a Dangerous and Deadly Temptation

Penny Kim is one of the few doctors still living, and she alone holds the key to ensuring the human race continues. Several of her friends are pregnant, and the clock is ticking down on their survival. Her days are filled with experiments and hope, while her nights are consumed with visions and dreams of the hard-bodied and powerful soldier who’s made her safety his one and only mission. She should be wary of him; she should be terrified of him. Yet all she feels is an unreal craving for his touch that gets stronger every day. Life is short, and she’s unwilling to wait, unaware of the danger already hunting them both. Some risks are worth it, even in this new and dangerous world.

I remember being so excited with the first of the Scorpius books when Jax’s story first appeared on my feed, and thought that Rebecca Zanetti had a fantastic thing going here—with an overall narrative arc, several pairings set up for book sequels and a rich, dystopic world for exploration. That there was the introduction of new characters and pairings along the way made me want more as well.

But my excitement waned as the series wore on, not because of the context or the world-building itself, but that I found myself increasingly disconnected from the pairings and a style of writing that felt abrupt, weirdly unpredictable and changeable at times, so much so that I couldn’t quite get into the emotional voices of the protagonists at all.

‘Knight Awakening’ was no different. I was eager to see how it would have all come together as we raced to a conclusion, but with multiple POVs and the number of loose threads that Zanetti tried to tie up, Marcus/Penny felt like a side story in a book that was supposed to be theirs, only that there were too many interruptions with so many other things happening at once that I couldn’t quite focus and enjoy a growing relationship that just felt skin deep despite the tension simmering between them. The start-stop feel of them trundling along tripped me up continuously and there were parts where I struggled to see how Marcus/Penny were actually growing as a couple apart from jumping into bed together.

But if that dragged on a bit—with some waffling on plot and character—, the sudden, bewildering shift in pace towards the very end to a quick, quick resolution did no justice to the overall arc that deserved more than a snap-of-the-fingers ending, almost as though Zanetti tired of the storytelling and decided to wrap it up in several sentences of telling rather than showing.

In all, this shaped out to be an uneven read with scenes that were quite engrossing and some twists and turns that I enjoyed. But I wish I could have liked ‘Knight Awakening’ better…after all, there’s quite a bit of nostalgia for this series when it started out so well but then took some knocks along the way, more so for a pairing that I’d come to root for a long time ago.