These Violent Delights

Perfect for fans of The Last Magician and Serpent & Dove, this heart-stopping debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River.

The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery.

A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal.

But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.

• These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
• Series: These Violent Delights book #1
• Published: Margaret K. McElderry Books on November 17, 2020
• Genre: Fantasy, romance, horror/thriller, historical fiction, Shakespeare retelling
• Pages: 464
• Dates/Time Read: 10.14.25 – 10.29.25 (11 hours 16 minutes)
• Format: eBook
• Add on Goodreads
• Purchase on Amazon
• ⭐⭐⭐½
• ☠☠☠
• 🌶

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Last year, I decided to purchase the Once Upon a Book Club specialty box of “Up All Night 2024”. It included a book, a champagne flute with 2025 stenciled on it, some gifts, and a scratch-off book challenge poster. (see picture)

If you can complete the challenge by the end of the year, you snap a picture of it and share it on their website, and then you receive a free gift/book from them. I’ve been rocking along all year, willy-nilly reading whatever struck my fancy, occasionally finding that a book matched a challenge prompt, and I’ve been doing pretty well so far. But at the beginning of October, I realized…holy cow, it’s October!!! I only have 3 months to complete this challenge, so I’d better check to see how close I am. I am still missing 5 prompts, you guys!!!!! I think I’m going to be able to manage to just barely get it done, but one of the hard ones was “A Shakespeare Retelling”.

Look…I had to read enough Shakespeare in high school and college, and I was never a fan. After reading Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name last year (amazing book by the way, 5⭐ read!), I’m even more not a fan of his, and am very strongly convinced that he was not the amazing genius writer that he was praised as being. I said what I said! lol So finding a retelling of his was never really on my “to-do” list. I quickly ran a Google search and saw this book popping up at the top of the list, and when I went to Amazon to read the blurb about it, looky here! I purchased this and the sequel back in February of this year! It was probably something on a Kindle sale for $1.99, I’m sure. Time to get that challenge prompt scratched off!

So let’s talk about the book, shall we? This book literally has it all!! It’s a fantasy, and it’s a romance; it has sci-fi horror and thriller themes with a monster stalking the city. It has political turmoil based on historical facts, and as I already mentioned, it’s a Shakespeare Retelling, with an enemies-to-lovers trope as well. That could also pretty much sum up my feelings on the book, too, because I had a love/hate relationship with it. I enjoyed the first quarter of the book, where we get a little introduction to the two main characters, Juliette and Roma. Each one is the heir to one of the two main rival gangs that held power in Shanghai during the 1920s. The Red Scarlets and the White Flowers. Are you seeing the obvious Romeo & Juliet references already? haha During their younger years of growing up, Juliette and Roma secretly became close friends, which led to romance, until the blood feud between the rival powers happened, leading to betrayal, heartbreak, and Juliette being forced to live abroad in New York.

Four years later, Juliette returns to her beloved Shanghai a very changed woman, and something is seriously wrong in the city. Men and women, regardless of loyalties, begin dropping dead from a madness that has them ripping out their own throats within minutes of becoming afflicted. I don’t want to give too much away about what is causing the “madness,” but let me just say, it definitely gave me the heebie-jeebies. Literally made my skin crawl, and that’s all I’m going to say about it! lol To save their city, Juliette and Roma realize that to accomplish this, they have to work together to discover what is causing this madness and figure out a way to stop it. But doing so requires them to put away their past feelings for each other, and as we all know…this is no easy task. This plot had me hooked, line, and sinker!

A love like theirs was never going to survive in a city divided by hatred. This would be the death of them all.

Buuut then came the middle/major portion of the book, and it was a bit of a slog fest. It would only hold my attention for 15-30 minutes at a time, and then I’d have to take a break. The major portion of this part of the book was about the rival gangs, the communists, nationalists, political stuff that just seemed to go on and on…and on. It almost felt like the author didn’t want to JUST write a fantasy/romance/horror novel, but also had to make it a historical fiction, so she had to throw a bunch of this other stuff in there, and it didn’t fit the overall plot to me. I’m ok with either or, but the book ramps up to be this fantasy romance, with an underlying sci-fi horror element, then totally switches gears and shoves political stuff down your throat. It left my head spinning. All I kept thinking during this phase of the book was “Come on!!! Get back to the good stuff already!” I think it was fine to have some of it in the book, because she wanted to call attention to the negative impact that colonialism had on Shanghai during the 1920s, but I think that it loses the average fantasy reader’s attention when she included so much of it. Just like I would imagine readers who thrive on historical fiction might be deterred from the book in the beginning, because it is so heavily fantasy, romance, and sci-fi horror. I applaud her for attempting this, though. Clearly, she did well at it because she went on to win a few awards for the book at only the age of 22.

My favorite part of the book was the last quarter, where the fantasy/romance and horror portion FINALLY picks back up, and boy does it! It is fast-paced to the end. My reading sessions during this part were hours long, and I truly could not wait to pick the book back up to find out what was going to happen. And that ending!!! I think this ending is going to have to go down as one of my top five favorite endings of a book, because I was not expecting that at all! And while the main plot of this book is resolved, the ending does have a cliff-hanger, and I dare you to NOT want to read the next book!! lol

Overall, I was impressed with Gong’s book, especially considering that she wrote and published this book at the age of 20 years old. I enjoyed her writing style. She has a beautiful way of describing scenarios and feelings in her book that come off sounding poetic, but not so over the top that I needed a dictionary to understand. I have 24 highlighted sections of the book, so that should tell you something. While I struggled at times to like or connect with Juliette, because her outer demeanor rarely matched her inner dialogue, you do eventually understand why that is the case. You learn that this is on purpose because she herself struggles with her own identity, admitting to having to keep up a certain facade so that she can survive. If I didn’t have so many books that I needed to get on to, I’d definitely be diving right into the next one to find out what happens, but sadly, it will have to wait.