Books › Tearsmith
Tearsmith
576 pages
A dark, fairy-tale-tinged romance steeped in shared trauma and the agonizing pull of forbidden love.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into a modern gothic fairy tale, where every glance is heavy with unspoken history and every touch burns with forbidden intensity. The atmosphere is thick with angst and brooding melancholy, wrapping the reader in a dread-soaked but deeply romantic mood. Its steady pace allows the emotional weight of childhood trauma and toxic longing to simmer, building a suffocating yet addictive tension between two deeply fractured souls. The prose is highly lyrical and saturated with dark metaphors, elevating a contemporary setting into something that feels mythic and haunting. It is a perfect match for readers who devour high-stakes, emotionally agonizing romances where love is both a destructive force and the ultimate salvation.
- Mood
- brooding
- atmospheric
- haunting
- angst-drenched
- Tone
- earnest
- intense
- melodramatic
- poetic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- trauma recovery · forbidden love · emotional scars · healing through connection · the shadow self
- The writing
- Lyrical, emotionally saturated, and heavily metaphorical, leaning into gothic fairy-tale imagery.
- The arc
- Moves from deep-seated fear and isolation into a turbulent, consuming passion, ultimately finding healing in shared brokenness.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave high-angst, slow-burn dark romance with broken, brooding heroes and trauma-bonded protagonists.
Content notes
- child abuse
- trauma
- emotional abuse
- toxic relationship dynamics
About the book
A dark, sexy, haunting novel of two aching young adults who are taken in by the same family and forced to reckon with a destructive love that could be the undoing of them both
Growing up in a ghastly orphanage run by an abusive matron, Nica coped in the only way she could—by retreating to her imagination, where she lived out fantastical stories, especially about the Tearsmith, the man who makes tears, a terrifying figure who forges all the fears that dwell in people’s hearts.
When she’s finally taken in by an adoptive family at seventeen, Nica thinks she’s leaving the group home, its torments, and her prison of otherworldly tales behind her. That is, until Rigel—a young man raised from birth in the same dreadful orphanage—joins her new family.
Rigel is as mesmerizingly handsome as he is troubled, and he and Nica have a long history of distrust and hostility. But as they come to live together again under one roof, the deep shared trauma of surviving such vicious circumstances sparks something magical, and Nica begins to fall for Rigel’s forbidden love.
Before any relationship can become reality, though, they’ll have to face the darkness of their past... and the dangerous stakes of pursuing a future together.
Description from Open Library.
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