The Taming – Past Midnight Book Reviews & More

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Spice: 🌶️

Title: The Taming

Author: Eve Hollenbeck

Format: eBook (NetGalley)

Pages: 376

Publication Date: 10/14/26

Publisher: Eve Hollenbeck

Categories: Dystopian, Sci-fi, Romance, Series

Disclaimer: **I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Thank you to Eve Hollenbeck for giving me a chance to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Survival is a strategy. Love is a risk.

Dessa Frost can find anyone with her psychic tracking gift, magic drawn from the planet itself. Using it openly will get her exiled, but she’ll do what it takes to find her missing brother. Even if it means leading a search party into the one place nobody is allowed to enter.

What she finds inside is worse than exile. Her planet has been chosen as the universe’s next battlefield. Before she can act, Dessa is conscripted into the Taming, where off-world nobility descend on fringe planets and fight to the death for rulership. To survive, she must choose the champion she’ll fight beside. One prospect is a stranger who promises her a reunion with her brother. The other is Tavish Arran, the man who broke her heart, now begging for a second chance with a secret that could save them both.

But before the Taming’s bloodshed even starts, her dear friend is murdered. Caught between the love she fears and the revenge she craves, Dessa has to decide who she trusts with her life…and who she’s willing to lose.

Content Warning: violence, death

+~ I thought the premise for this story was very intriguing. Dessa and her friends are searching for her family and get caught and thrown into the Taming. A deadly game that nobles from other planets play when they want to rule a planet. Dessa and her friends get put into teams and they have to survive and try to win but the Scion they are teamed up with is not all he seems. While reading this I just needed a little more world-building because any stories taking place in space is hard for me to envision.

+~ There is a second chance romance with Dessa and a young man she didn’t know was a Scion. Now that she knows, she feels betrayed but it’s hard to stay away from him because the attraction between them is so strong. I did like her romance with him but they have a past we hardly know about and I would have loved more interactions between them plus more memories.

+~ I finally got into the story near the halfway mark because the Taming starts and there is more action. It was giving a bit Hunger Games vibes. I just needed more details, world building, descriptions because hard for me to visualize things in this story. There are more reveals at the end of the story that I thought was interesting.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, I think I would have enjoyed this story more if there was more world-building and descriptions of the setting and the people. I liked the idea of the Taming though, these deadly games that nobles partake in to rule a planet – it shows how colonization doesn’t just stop on Earth. Give humans a chance and they will want to colonize planets, which is kind of sad. If you like dystopian stories, you might want to give this one a chance.

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