Belladonna

Belladonna by Adalyn Grace is a Victorian-inspired Gothic romantasy series following an orphan with a death-touched life and a slow-burning, forbidden romance with Death himself. Poison, mystery, and dark magic.

The Belladonna series is Adalyn Grace's breakout Gothic romantasy, set in a lush, shadow-draped Victorian-inspired world where death is not an abstraction but a presence - watchful, beautiful, and entirely too close for comfort. The series follows Signa Farrow, an orphan who has spent her entire life on the edge of death without crossing it, and whose unusual relationship with mortality draws her into a world of poison, dark secrets, and a forbidden romance that defies the boundary between the living and the dead. With its richly atmospheric setting, intricately plotted mysteries, and a central romance built on genuine tension and wit, the series became one of the defining romantasy releases of recent years, accumulating an extraordinary number of reader ratings and cementing Adalyn Grace as one of the genre's most compelling voices.

The world Grace constructs across the series is one of its greatest pleasures. Thorn Grove - the grand, decaying estate at the heart of the first book - is rendered with the full weight of Gothic literary tradition: crumbling grandeur, hidden histories, creeping suspicion, and an atmosphere that makes the setting feel like a participant in the story rather than mere backdrop. The Victorian-inflected social world surrounding Signa adds layers of constraint and irony, with etiquette and propriety sitting in sharp, often darkly comic contrast to the supernatural forces swirling beneath the surface. Grace understands that good Gothic fiction uses its environment to externalise its characters' inner lives, and the series delivers on that understanding with consistency and flair.

What sets the Belladonna series apart within the romantasy space is its genre fluency. Grace blends Gothic fantasy, mystery and secrets revealed, and slow-burning romance in proportions that feel genuinely balanced - the mystery plots are real mysteries, not ornamental ones, and the necromancy underpinning the magic system carries genuine consequence and texture. Signa's particular abilities - her strange relationship with death, her immunity, her growing understanding of what she is - unfold across the series in a way that rewards patience and pays off across instalments.

The slow-burn romance between Signa and Death is the series' emotional engine. Grace constructs it with care, understanding that the appeal of this dynamic lies not just in the eventual payoff but in the accumulation of charged moments, witty exchanges, and the gradual dismantling of distance between two figures who should not, by any logic, be drawn to each other. Death himself is written as morally grey in the most compelling sense - neither villain nor straightforward love interest, but something more complicated and more interesting than either.

Books in the Belladonna series

Belladonna (2022) is the first book in the Belladonna series, introducing Signa Farrow - an orphan who has never been able to hold onto a family, and who carries an inexplicable connection to death that has followed her throughout her life. When Signa arrives at Thorn Grove to live with distant relatives, she finds a household haunted by grief, by suspicion, and by the possibility that something sinister lies behind a recent death in the family. As she investigates, she finds herself in the company of Death himself - and what begins as an uneasy arrangement deepens into something neither of them can easily explain or dismiss. Belladonna establishes the series' Gothic atmosphere, its Protagonist with Trauma, its poison-threaded mystery, and the enemies to lovers dynamic that will carry across the series. It is a confident, atmospheric debut for the world, with a mystery that holds its shape and a romance that earns its tension.

Foxglove (2023) is the second book in the Belladonna series, continuing Signa's story as the world of the first book expands considerably beyond the confines of Thorn Grove. Where Belladonna was rooted in a single estate and its Gothic mystery, Foxglove opens the series outward - into society, into new dangers, and into the deeper implications of Signa's abilities and her connection to Death. The dark secrets established in the first book give way to new complications, new threats, and a continued deepening of the central relationship. Grace uses the sequel to broaden the series' scope whilst maintaining the atmosphere and emotional investment that made the first book so compelling.

Wisteria (2024) is the third book in the Belladonna series, bringing Signa's journey to its conclusion as the threads woven across Belladonna and Foxglove are drawn together. The stakes that have built across the series reach their peak here, with Signa navigating the full consequences of her abilities, her place in a world that straddles the living and the dead, and a central relationship that must finally resolve on terms neither she nor Death could have anticipated at the outset. Grace uses the finale to honour the atmospheric and emotional foundations of the series whilst pushing both her protagonist and her world to their limits - delivering the payoff that readers who have followed Signa from Thorn Grove have been building toward across three instalments.

The Belladonna series is characterised by its Victorian-Gothic setting, the interplay between forbidden romance and necromancy, mysteries constructed with genuine craft, morally grey characters on both sides of the living-dead divide, and a tone that balances darkness with wit. Adalyn Grace writes with a real understanding of what makes Gothic romantasy work - the atmosphere must be earned, the romance must be built, and the world must feel like it has weight beyond the pages currently in front of the reader. This series delivers on all three.