Author: Ellie Sandoval
Series: Carnal Sanctuary Book 4
Overall Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

“This battle is over. We survived, but the war has only begun.”
— Moon & Shadow, Ellie Sandoval

ARC Disclosure: I received an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of this book in exchange for an honest review. Receiving a complimentary copy did not influence my opinions. As always, all thoughts, reactions, fangirling, suspicious side-eyeing, and sleep-deprived ramblings are entirely my own. 

PLEASE NOTE: Before we get too deep into the supernatural chaos, I need to give you guys a little context about how I ended up starting here. I was asked to review Moon & Shadow, which is Book Four in the six-book Carnal Sanctuary saga, but I have not read the first three books in the series yet. Normally, you guys know me—I like starting at the beginning because willingly walking into Book Four of an established paranormal saga without knowing anybody is basically volunteering to show up late to a supernatural family reunion where everyone has slept with, fought, betrayed, rescued, or possibly tried to murder someone else at the table. 😂 But this was the book I was asked to review, so into the chaos I went.

I also want to be completely fair to the book about that, because Moon & Shadow is not intended to be read as a standalone. It takes place nine months after Savannah’s Desires and continues the main storyline established in Savannah’s Awakening, Savannah’s Temptation, and Savannah’s Desires. There is also Gabbie’s Way, which is Book 1.5. So if you’re discovering this series through my review, I would definitely recommend doing what I apparently did not get the memo about and starting with Book One. 😂 There are already established relationships, supernatural bloodlines, alliances, enemies, histories, and old grudges in motion when this book begins, so there were naturally moments when I knew I was missing some background. I am not going to hold that against a fourth book for expecting its readers to have read the first three.

The good news is that those earlier books are already on my ARC reading list, and I’ll be going back to the beginning and reviewing them next, so stay tuned. 🖤 I’m actually really curious to experience Lucas, Belladonna, Savannah, and the rest of this wonderfully dysfunctional supernatural crew from the beginning now that I’ve gotten a rather chaotic glimpse of where everything eventually leads. I have a feeling reading backward after seeing Book Four is going to result in quite a few OH… so THAT’S why! moments, and honestly, I’m here for it.

One more thing worth knowing before diving in is that Moon & Shadow is not simply another installment tucked into the middle of the series. This book launches the God Killer Wars trilogy and marks a major turning point in the larger Carnal Sanctuary saga. Even coming into the series at Book Four, I could absolutely feel that shift. The world gets bigger, the threats get nastier, and whatever these people thought constituted a bad day before apparently was not trying hard enough.

MOON & SHADOW

At some point while reading Moon & Shadow, I realized Ellie Sandoval had apparently decided that werewolves, witches, immortals, shadow assassins, ancient bloodlines, kidnappings, creepy supernatural offspring, family dysfunction, questionable sexual decisions, and enough violence to keep a crime-scene cleanup crew employed indefinitely simply were not enough. No, no. Clearly what this situation needed was more chaos. 😂🖤 By the time everything started going spectacularly to hell, I had accepted that my job was no longer to ask reasonable questions. My job was to sit there with my coffee, watch these people make increasingly dangerous decisions, and occasionally think, Well, this seems like an absolutely terrible idea. Please continue.

The war for Astoria has now spilled into the Sonoran Desert, and when two of their own are taken by La Familia de San Lebarón, Lucas and Belladonna leave the relative safety of Roman’s mansion and head straight into enemy territory. Because naturally, when your friends are kidnapped by a horrifying supernatural family operating out of the ruins of a dead polygamy colony in the desert, the reasonable response is apparently to grab your weapons, kiss common sense goodbye, and turn it into a road trip.

Unfortunately, what they find waiting for them is much worse than a rescue mission gone sideways. There are things lurking within the Lebarón compound that absolutely should not exist, something ancient beneath the desert with a very long memory and one hell of a grudge, and forces beginning to move that make it increasingly obvious that whatever these characters thought they were fighting before was basically the warm-up act.

Lucas was easily one of my favorite parts of this book. He has this combination of loyalty, strength, trauma, protectiveness, and stubborn determination that makes him incredibly easy to root for. He isn’t simply the resident werewolf muscle waiting around for someone to point him toward the bad guys. There is emotional weight behind him, particularly when it comes to Belladonna and the people he considers his own. When things get ugly—and sweet baby Satan, do they get ugly—Lucas is the kind of man who will walk straight into hell if someone he loves is somewhere inside it. Is that healthy? Probably not. Is it attractive when fictional men do it? Unfortunately, yes. My standards remain questionable, and I have made peace with that. 😂

Then there is Belladonna, and listen, I love a woman who gives off the distinct impression that she could kill everyone in the room and still make it home in time for dinner. Belladonna is powerful, lethal, confident, sexually unapologetic, and absolutely terrifying when someone threatens the people she loves. What really worked for me, though, was seeing more underneath all of that. Her relationship with Lucas gives her an emotional vulnerability that makes her so much more interesting than simply being the badass Shadowcaste assassin.

There is genuine love between these two, and beneath all the sex, danger, blood, and supernatural insanity, their relationship gives this story one of its strongest emotional anchors. Belladonna has faced death before, but what happens with the darkness in this book puts her in an entirely different kind of danger. Something that has always been connected to her power begins feeling considerably less like a tool she controls and more like something with intentions of its own, and I loved that creepy little development. Whenever the supernatural darkness giving someone power starts acting like it has plans, I personally start backing toward the exit while maintaining eye contact. 😂

Eliza may have surprised me even more. She begins in a much more vulnerable position than characters like Lucas or Belladonna, but watching her gradually realize there is considerably more power inside her than she understood was one of the most satisfying parts of the book. She gets thrown into circumstances that are horrifying even by Carnal Sanctuary standards, and instead of suddenly becoming some perfectly fearless paranormal superhero, you can still feel her fear, confusion, anger, grief, and determination.

That is what made her growth work for me. It felt earned. By the time Eliza starts discovering what she can actually do, I was already sitting there thinking, Ohhhh. Somebody has seriously underestimated the wrong woman. Those are some of my favorite fictional moments because there is just something deeply satisfying about watching everyone realize they picked the wrong person to push around. 😂🖤

There are plenty of other familiar and new players woven throughout the story, including Zoey, Dillon, Sheriff Vale, Cyril, Cazador, Sidon, Illyana, Domingo, and enough additional supernatural troublemakers to require assigned seating at Thanksgiving. The expanding cast makes sense here, though, because Moon & Shadow is opening the door to a much larger conflict.

The story stretches across Nevada, Oregon, Mexico, and even the Dark Dimension while separate storylines slowly begin tightening around one another. There are kidnappings, betrayals, magical discoveries, family politics, ancient grudges, shifting loyalties, disturbing supernatural revelations, and one particularly unsettling child situation that made me reconsider every cute baby video I have ever watched. I am officially unavailable for supernatural babysitting duties until further notice. 😂

The paranormal worldbuilding was one of the things I enjoyed most because the different supernatural beings do not feel interchangeable. Werewolves feel different from witches. Shadowcaste have their own abilities and history. Immortals come with complicated bloodlines, beliefs, politics, and hierarchies. Magic has consequences, and the supernatural history underneath everything feels much larger than what is happening in this one installment.

That becomes especially important as Moon & Shadow starts laying the groundwork for the God Killer Wars. You get the feeling that some of what is happening here represents only the first dominoes beginning to fall. I love when a series reaches that point where everything starts widening out and earlier pieces suddenly feel much more important than they originally appeared.

And let me be clear about something else: this book is dark.

This is not paranormal romance wearing a cute pair of plastic vampire fangs and calling itself dangerous. There is graphic violence, captivity, coercion, explicit sexual content, trafficking, ritual violence, monster predation, power imbalances, body horror, death, and some genuinely disturbing imagery. The book includes a content warning for a reason, and I strongly recommend reading it before diving in if you have specific triggers.

The villains deserve some credit too, because Sidon Lebarón is the kind of man who makes you understand why pushing people into volcanoes was once considered a perfectly reasonable community activity. He is arrogant, cruel, manipulative, sexually predatory, obsessed with power and bloodlines, and completely convinced that his own importance excuses virtually anything. Every time something went wrong for him, the tiny petty gremlin living inside me quietly whispered, Oh no… anyway. 😂

Illyana fascinated me for a completely different reason. There is something much bigger simmering beneath her storyline, particularly where Lilith, the Shadowcaste, and the idea of a new Nod are concerned. She is not simply standing behind Sidon playing evil supernatural wife number whatever-we’re-up-to-now. She has ambitions of her own, and by the end I was considerably more interested in what she might eventually become than whatever Sidon thinks he is.

Then the book eventually decides that normal levels of chaos are for quitters and goes completely feral.

The later portion is where all those separate threads begin crashing together, and once that happens, the pacing goes from busy to somebody apparently cut the brakes. There are rescues, betrayals, transformations, supernatural abilities awakening, bullets flying, monsters appearing, people dying, shadows doing suspicious shadow things, and enough general carnage that I eventually stopped trying to predict who was going to walk away and simply held onto my coffee.

I loved that escalation. Knowing that this book launches the God Killer Wars makes the size of everything happening feel intentional. This is not supposed to neatly tie everything into a pretty little bow and send everybody home for a nap. Something much larger has started, and by the end of this book, you definitely know it.

That said, the sheer size of the story is also where my biggest criticism comes in and ultimately why I landed at four stars instead of five. There are moments when Moon & Shadow has so much happening that I wanted certain emotional moments to have just a little more room to breathe. I am not talking about needing the book to reintroduce characters or simplify the mythology, because this is Book Four and I actually appreciate that it trusts readers who have been following the series. I simply wanted to stay inside a few of its strongest moments a little longer before the next storyline came knocking.

Lucas and Belladonna have such a compelling relationship that I occasionally wanted more time with them before another plot thread demanded attention. I felt similarly about Eliza because some enormous things happen to and around her, particularly later in the book, and I would have loved a little more time to sit inside the emotional consequences before the next supernatural dumpster fire came rolling down the hill.

That is really what would have pushed Moon & Shadow into five-star territory for me. I would not necessarily want less mythology, fewer supernatural elements, or a smaller conflict because the scale is clearly important to where the saga is heading. I simply wanted a little more breathing room around its strongest emotional moments so they could land even harder before the story raced toward the next disaster.

And because this is Carnal Sanctuary, we obviously need to discuss the spice. 🌶️😂

This is firmly a 🌶️ 4/5 for me. The sexual content is explicit, frequent, and definitely intended for adult readers. Lucas and Belladonna have a very physical relationship, and sexuality is woven openly throughout the world and its characters. There are also unconventional sexual dynamics and relationships, so readers who prefer their romance fairly traditional should probably know that before wandering through the front door expecting a couple of tasteful kisses and a closed bedroom door.

That bedroom door has left the building, packed a suitcase, crossed state lines, and may currently be living under an assumed name. Nobody knows where it went. 😂

What I appreciate, though, is that the spice is not the only thing holding this book together. There is an actual story underneath all those missing clothes. The paranormal mythology, relationships, political maneuvering, betrayals, supernatural history, and increasingly dangerous war brewing in the background give Moon & Shadow plenty to do outside the bedroom.

Overall, Moon & Shadow was a wild, dark, bloody, sexy paranormal ride that clearly has absolutely no intention of letting this supernatural family have a normal week ever again. 😂🖤 The strongest parts for me were Lucas and Belladonna’s relationship, Eliza discovering the extent of her own power, the expanding Shadowcaste mythology, and that gloriously chaotic final stretch where everybody’s plans basically packed a suitcase and headed straight to hell.

If you enjoy dark paranormal romance with werewolves, witches, immortals, ancient bloodlines, morally questionable supernatural beings, dark magic, explicit spice, graphic violence, complicated relationships, powerful women, dangerous men, monsters, and enough family drama to make your own relatives suddenly seem refreshingly normal, the Carnal Sanctuary saga definitely has plenty waiting for you.

Just learn from me and start with Book One. 😂 Read Savannah’s Awakening, Savannah’s Temptation, and Savannah’s Desires first so you get the full weight of the relationships, history, reveals, and sheer amount of supernatural WTFery before reaching Moon & Shadow. As for me, I will be heading backward into those earlier ARCs next, and considering what I just witnessed in Book Four, I have a feeling I am about to discover exactly how this beautifully dysfunctional mess got started.

Because by Book Four, introductions are over.

The god killers are going to war.

And judging by Moon & Shadow, apparently nobody thought to bring a fire extinguisher. 🖤😂

🖤 Now It’s Your Turn

Have you read Moon & Shadow or any of the Carnal Sanctuary series yet? Tell me where you are in the series, who your favorite character is, and whether the God Killer Wars have already dragged you into the chaos. And because we all know I am nosy when it comes to other readers’ ratings, drop your ⭐ overall rating and 🌶️ spice rating too.

All honest opinions are welcome here—whether you loved the book, landed somewhere in the middle, or it simply wasn’t for you. Your opinion doesn’t have to match mine because we all connect with books differently. The only thing I ask is that any criticism stays constructive. If something didn’t work for you, tell us why and, when you can, what might have made it stronger. You can dislike the plot, pacing, characters, or the entire book without making it personal. We’re here to talk books and help our authors grow, not tear them down or each other. We can disagree about books without summoning demons in the comment section. Probably.
🖤 SASSY