Sarah Baker is a paralegal in a law firm in modern-day Brooklyn. Her life is bouncing between her abusive lawyer boyfriend, the voices she hears in her head and her soul-sucking work at the law firm. On a New York spring day, she meets Caio as he plays basketball on a street court.
He is alluring, intriguing and young. Yet that’s the least of his mystery, for Caio was beaten, thrown into a hole and left to die. In 1905.
Sarah tries to understand this enigmatic stranger while juggling the dubious ethics of her law firm and the ghosts in her head. As she struggles with loss, grief, love, beauty… and lawyers, she will need to summon the strength to break all of society’s rules, save several lives and step into a new and potentially magical life.
Purchase a copy of Caio
If you know me at all you know I cannot resist a good cover, and if the synopsis speaks to me after that then I am already sold. That is exactly how Caio found its way into my hands. This is book one of the Limerent series by LS Delorme, though not the first book I have read from this series, and I was excited to finally get to it. Thank you to WOW Women on Writing for including me on this tour.
The Story
Caio weaves together two separate storylines. The first follows Sarah, a woman navigating a complicated and abusive relationship while working a case at her law firm that turns out to be hiding something much bigger and much darker than anyone anticipated. That storyline pulled me in completely. The second follows Sarah’s growing connection with a mysterious figure named Caio, who is presented as a paranormal being with a soul far older than his physical appearance suggests. The paranormal element is what initially drew me to this series and there are moments where it delivers. However, there are also some significant content choices woven into these storylines that I need to talk about honestly, and I will get to those.
Reading Experience
The overall plot kept me hooked and wanting to read more. The law firm storyline in particular was genuinely interesting and the kind of slow unraveling that makes you need to know what happens next. I love paranormal books deeply and any paranormal element usually works for me, but this one did not quite hit the mark in the way I was hoping. The writing itself is fantastic. It kept me reading, pulled me along, and the pacing worked. It was some of the content choices within that writing that gave me pause.
Characters
Sarah is our main character and I found her difficult to connect with. She carries a lot of pain from an abusive relationship and a difficult upbringing, and that feels real and honest. But at no point in this story does Sarah find her own inner worth. The only time her confidence grows is through the validation of others, specifically through the attention of men. She never arrives at a place of loving herself simply because she is worth it, and that was hard for me to sit with.
Karl, her abusive boyfriend, is appropriately skeezy and easy to dislike, which I think was entirely the intention and it worked.
Caio is where things got complicated for me. He is clearly meant to be mysterious and intriguing, but he had so many opportunities throughout this story to be honest about who he was and he consistently chose to drop vague clues instead. Rather than feeling mysterious, he came across as intentionally withholding in a way that made him feel untrustworthy rather than compelling.
Themes and Tone
I want to be thoughtful here because I think the bones of this story are genuinely good. The paranormal elements, the law firm mystery, the atmosphere of secrets and hidden worlds underneath the surface of a city… all of that worked for me. But there are a few content choices in this book that I cannot move past and I would not be doing right by my readers if I did not name them.
The first is the age gap storyline. For a significant portion of this book Sarah believes Caio to be sixteen years old. The two of them flirt, develop feelings, and become physical while Sarah is under that impression. Caio’s explanation that his soul is much older and he is simply trapped in a younger body does not come until much later in the story. That timeline is a hard no for me regardless of the paranormal framing.
The second is a conversation that takes place between Sarah and Caio that I found deeply troubling. Without going into full detail, the exchange involves Caio suggesting that Sarah could not have stopped him from getting physical with her and that what happened between them was going to happen even if she didn’t want it to. The framing of that conversation was one of the most disappointing content choices I have encountered in… well, ever. (I go into more detail about this in my video review.)
I want to be clear that I am sharing this as a reader who advocates strongly for body safety and healthy representations of relationships in fiction. These are not small things and they are worth naming.
I will also say this: if Caio had been written as twenty one and Sarah as forty, the age gap would have remained interesting and a little controversial without crossing the line it currently crosses. And if that conversation had simply not been written the way it was, this book would have been a four star read for me. The foundation is that strong. These specific choices pulled it down significantly.
Final Thoughts
I wanted to love this book and in many ways I did like it. The writing is good, the mystery kept me turning pages, and the paranormal elements had potential. But I cannot in good conscience recommend this one without being very direct about the content concerns I have named above. The book does include trigger warnings at the front, which I appreciate, but the volume and nature of those warnings also raises a serious question as to why it’s given a YA classification. This series does not belong in the YA category. Full stop.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this virtual book tour, Women On Writing
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Lexy Delorme was born in San Diego, California. After graduating from the University of North Carolina School of law, various internships and years working in risk, tax, family, and international law, she now classifies herself as a recovering attorney.
With a father who served in the US Military, Lexy had a wandering lifestyle from her earliest days and in her time has been a pop musician, a science geek and a writer for magazines like Bonjour Paris and Playtimes. Throughout all of her different careers, her love of fiction has been a mainstay.
Within this eclectic life, she was also one of the first employees at 23andMe, a genomics and biotechnology company based in Mountain View, California and that experience influenced the genetic aspects of her Limerent Series, of which Caio is the first book.
For as long as she can remember she’s had characters in her head. As a child, these were the friends she wished to have. As a young woman, the lovers she wanted to find or the people she wanted to become. Writing fiction novels allows her the chance to give these characters a background, a story and a voice.
Having lived in in 3 continents, 9 US states, and 21 cities around the world, including London and Hong Kong, Lexy now lives in Paris with her French husband and two very cool sons. She is currently working on the next books in the Limerent Series.
Cozy Home Delight 
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