Terror at the Gates by Scarlett St. Clair

"Romantasy" with almost no fantasy... or romance? Review by Kodie Pohl

Overview:

Terror at the Gates by Scarlett St. Clair will release July 9th, 2025, and is a romantasy book set in the Garden of Eden and surrounding areas. It follows the female main character, Lilith, and we also see some perspectives from the male main character, Zahariev. Throughout the book, we see Lilith struggle in a society where women do not have the upper hand, but they do have magic. Struggling to separate from her very powerful family, she finds a dagger that ends up killing the man she tries to sell it to, which leads her down a very large rabbit hole of figuring out where the dagger came from and what it is used for.

Review:

Unfortunately, I did not end up enjoying this book. I was interested in the synopsis because it seemed like something I would normally read. Terror at the Gates is supposed to dual point of view, which it barely was. Certain chapters were ended by maybe a paragraph or two of dialogue by the main male character. Most of the time, I did not deem these insights necessary, and they almost seem repetitive. I don't feel like they added to the story in most cases.

Terror at the Gates is the first book being published in the Blood of Lilith series. For this reason, I understand that the main purpose of the book is to help with character building, plot building, explaining the backstory of all the characters, and how their society works. For me, it was too slow, and unfortunately, I don’t think that there was enough information learned about the plot to make this book worth reading. I can say that the ending and the cliffhanger were pretty good and I am intrigued to see what happens next but based off of the writing in this book and the way that everything was executed I don't particularly have interest in reading the next book in the series because I was growing tired of not getting to the point.

This book started out good, I did like the character traits that Lilith had, including: female rage, defending herself, separating from her family, going against men, and being an individual in a society where women are controlled by men. There were also good side characters, such as Lilith's best friend. I like the unique traits that Lilith has, but again, I just wish things were faster paced and there wasn't so much filler. I feel like I barely know what was going on in the plot, and I still have a lot of questions that should have been answered.

In the aspect of romance, it is a slow burn, and most of the romance scenes end up taking place in the second-to-last chapter. The scenes were good, but I didn't necessarily feel the angst between the two main characters. I was somewhat frustrated when I realized that I was on the second-to-last chapter with a list of questions about the plot, and most of the time was taken up by a romance scene. This would have done a lot better earlier on and would have made me, as a reader, less frustrated. The connection between the main characters would have been better if there had been more banter or more backstory between them. I feel like that was lacking in this case, so it just made me more annoyed than that “oh finally!” feeling that you get most of the time.

I do not want to discredit this book. I do think that there were some good parts to it, such as the character building, but for me, this was not a book that I would necessarily recommend, but I didn't think it was so bad that I wanted to DNF it. If you like heavy plot building, heavy character building, low fantasy, and low romance, then this would be a good book for you. I am interested to see how the following books in this series develop people's opinions of the first books, but I do not think I will continue to read the series after the next books come out.