Made (Maddox & Ellie)
📖✨ 13Pages Review
🧠 Opening Chaos
Well, friends.
We made it.
Five books.
Five emotionally constipated billionaire brothers.
One deeply traumatized family that treats communication like it's a felony.
Welcome to Made, the fifth and final book in Sadie Kincaid's Manhattan Ruthless series, featuring the youngest James brother, Maddox.
Now if you've been here since Book 1, you already know Maddox's story has been haunting the edges of this series the whole time.
And baby...
It is a story.
Grab your coffee, your emotional support snack, and maybe a red pen because we're going to have to mark up some plot holes before this thing is over.
📚 Plot + Vibe Dump
Every book in this series opens the same way.
It's New Year's Eve.
Verona James is dead.
The James family is shattered.
And each brother gives us their perspective on the first holiday without their mother.
This time, it's Maddox's turn.
Now we already know the basics.
Maddox fell in love with a girl named Yasmin.
He took her to a party.
She was brutally assaulted by three wealthy boys whose families used money and influence to destroy her credibility in court.
Nathan offered to represent her.
Her father refused.
The boys walked.
Yasmin never lived to see the verdict because she took her own life first.
That tragedy, mixed with losing his mother, sent Maddox into a spiral of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction.
His lowest point?
Selling the navy watch his great-grandfather left him.
The one his mother gave him.
Nathan eventually got it back, because honestly Nathan spends half this series cleaning up after everybody else.
Maddox disappeared.
Traveled the world.
Got sober.
Has been sober for eight years.
Attends meetings.
Rebuilt his life.
And somewhere along the way he met Ellie.
Except...
The timeline doesn't make a lick of sense.
He says he met her in Marrakech two years ago.
He also says he started his celibacy journey four years ago.
But somehow meeting Ellie and the celibacy timeline don't actually line up.
Baby, the math ain't mathing.
💀 Character Crimes Section
🖤 Maddox James
I feel cheated on Maddox's behalf.
For four books this man has been built up as the broken, recovering, emotionally intelligent James brother.
The one who fought addiction.
The one who lost the love of his life.
The one who came home after years of trying to heal.
And honestly?
Maddox is wonderful.
He's kind.
He's patient.
He's emotionally available.
He's supportive.
He's encouraging.
He's fine as hell.
He's got the big bank account.
The tattoos.
The sobriety journey.
The emotional intelligence.
This man is basically what every romance reader says they want after dating forty-seven morally gray psychopaths.
And somehow...
This poor man spends half the book reassuring a woman who acts like him wanting to be her friend was the emotional equivalent of a felony.
Honestly, this book should have been called:
How Maddox James Didn't Relapse.
Because Lord have mercy.
All that would drive a sane man crazy.
💀 Ellie (FMC)
Okay.
Deep breath.
I tried.
I REALLY tried.
Ellie starts the book by throwing her raggedy gym-bro boyfriend out after he tells her she needs to lose weight.
I was cheering.
I was ready.
I thought:
"Okay, girl. Stand up. We love a woman with a backbone."
And then...
She spends the rest of the book beating herself up.
At one point she says Maddox shattered her self-confidence because he didn't sleep with her after they met and said he just wanted to be friends.
Excuse me?
What are we talking about?
You knew this man for one night.
He politely declined sex.
And now we're acting like he emotionally destroyed you?
Girl.
Self-esteem is the esteem of yourself.
As Katt Williams would say, how can somebody else tell you how to feel about you?
And don't even get me started on how this book writes plus-size women.
You would think Ellie was auditioning for My 600-lb Life.
Meanwhile, she's doing Pilates on a reformer, comparing herself to Jessica Rabbit, and eventually tells us she's a...
Size 12.
A SIZE TWELVE.
Baby.
Jessica Rabbit had curves.
Marilyn Monroe wore the equivalent of a modern size 12.
This woman is acting like she's carrying around the weight of the world because some Dollar Tree Barbie socialite called her a hippo at a charity gala.
And yes, Laura Boswick deserves to step on Legos forever.
But I spent half this book wanting to grab Ellie by the shoulders and say:
"Girl... stand up."
Because every time she showed signs of being strong, she immediately turned around and let her insecurities hijack the entire plot.
📉 Chaos Corner
This book has more plot holes than Swiss cheese.
Yasmin's father goes to prison after killing two of the boys who assaulted his daughter.
We later find out Maddox killed the third one.
Nathan gets involved.
Then somehow Lorenzo Moretti is suddenly the head of the Chicago Mafia.
Except... wasn't that Dante Moretti?
Did I hallucinate an entire series?
Also...
How did Ellie’s father and Yasmin's father even meet?
One was in prison in Illinois.
One was in prison in New York.
Did they become pen pals?
Was there a Prison Facebook I don't know about?
This question just hangs over the story while everyone pretends it makes sense.
And the grammar.
Baby.
The grammar.
I eventually discovered Sadie Kincaid is from the UK, which explains some of the wording that felt off to my American ears.
But the editing?
The editing clocked out early.
The first three books didn't have this problem.
The last two absolutely did.
Some of this writing was being held together by hopes, prayers, and maybe a little unicorn dust.
😒 Side-Eye Section
At one point Ellie decides Maddox has a feeder kink.
Why?
Because he compliments her.
That's it.
That's the evidence.
In the span of about three sentences we go from:
"I like when Maddox praises me."
To:
"Oh my God. He only likes me because he wants to feed me."
Girl.
Put the keys to the bus down.
You have driven yourself straight to Crazy Town.
Population: you.
I have never seen someone make that many emotional leaps over absolutely nothing.
😭 What Actually Worked
Now let me be fair.
Because there were things I liked.
I loved that there was no third-act breakup.
THANK YOU.
We have all suffered enough.
I loved seeing characters from Chicago Ruthless and the Ryan brothers pop up. I am a sucker for interconnected universes where everybody knows everybody and the organized crime community apparently has a group text.
I also really appreciated the emotional through-line of healing.
Maddox healing from Yasmin.
Dalton and Maddox finally finding their way back to each other.
Ellie confronting what happened to her as a child.
Because that part?
That was genuinely heartbreaking.
Ellie's father abused all four of his children after their mother died.
Ellie testified against him and put him in prison.
When he gets out, her adopted family—Keres, Ace, and Romeo—step in to handle business.
And listen...
I don't know those people very well.
But billionaire bad boys with good jobs, better bank accounts, and no issue getting their hands dirty?
I support women's rights.
And women's wrongs.
🔥 Spice Rating (13Pages Scale)
🌶️🌶️🌶️✨ — 3.5 chili peppers.
There was plenty of spice.
There is always plenty of spice.
Sadie Kincaid never met a sex scene she didn't want to write.
Unfortunately, I would've traded one or two of them for tighter plotting and a little more character development.
📊 Damage Report
⭐⭐⭐ — 3 stars.
Good emotional ideas.
A James brother who deserved better.
An FMC that tested my patience.
And enough inconsistencies to make me wonder if the copy editor left halfway through.
🧨 Final Verdict
I wanted to love this book.
I really did.
For four books, Maddox James was built up to be this tragic, complicated, recovering soul who had clawed his way back from addiction and grief.
And honestly?
He lived up to the hype.
The problem wasn't Maddox.
The problem was that he felt like he belonged in a better, tighter, more carefully edited story.
Ellie had moments where I genuinely liked her.
She stood up to her ex.
She stood up to the mean girls.
She survived unimaginable things.
But then she'd turn around and project every insecurity she had onto Maddox, and I spent half the book wanting to shake some sense into her.
The emotional storylines worked.
The healing between Maddox and Dalton worked.
The interconnected universe worked.
But the plot holes, grammar issues, repetitive body-image spiral, and uneven pacing kept pulling me out of the story.
And honestly?
I think Maddox James deserved more care than this.
More attention.
More detail.
More editing.
More respect.
Because after four books of waiting for his story, this one felt a little phoned in.
And that disappointed me more than anything.
💬 Signature Outro
This book needed:
a continuity editor
a grammar check
fewer plot holes
one conversation about body image that wasn't rooted in self-loathing
somebody to explain to Ellie that a size 12 is not, in fact, the apocalypse
and a public service announcement reminding everyone that Maddox James did not survive addiction, grief, and eight years of sobriety just to spend 400 pages reassuring other people's insecurities.
Will I miss the James family?
Against my better judgment...
Yeah.
I kind of will.