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A review by solvii
Twisted Hate by Ana Huang
2.0
I think I knew from the start what i was getting myself into with this series (original covers with photos of men never bode well for the content lol). I started listening to the audio books, which are awful (why would you have the same narrators for all 4 books?), and they give no character to any of the protagonists. So i wanted to give Twisted Hate a fighting chance and started reading it on my kindle.
Reading it was a lot better and half way through I was surprised that I enjoyed it quite a bit. Well, until that scene. Obviously these books deal with some questionable themes (the entire first book was absolutely ridiculous) but I was still shocked how little contextualisation the scene got where he had sex with Jules and then told her he lied about forgiving her and threw her out of his house. That was most definitely sexual assault and looking at the content notes afterwards describing it as "mildy dubious consent" feels insane. The fact it only took her like a week or two to forgive him for that and all the awfully cruel things he said felt like a violation towards the FMC and female readers in general. Especially as it's pretty obvious that power play is part of the story. I almost wished for Jules to come into the hospital with a way more serious injury, just so he would realize how much he fucked up. How did psycho Alex become the reasonable one wtf. All that kind of ruined the rest of the book for me. Otherwise it might have been a 2,5 or 3 star read.
ALSO, Ana Huang for some reason found one way to write sex scenes and just stuck to it for every character in the entire series so far? Come on, find something else than the FMC having to get on her knees or on all fours?? They can't all be into the exact same shit?? It's also always just very physically descriptive and not very emotionally intriguing?
Reading it was a lot better and half way through I was surprised that I enjoyed it quite a bit. Well, until that scene. Obviously these books deal with some questionable themes (the entire first book was absolutely ridiculous) but I was still shocked how little contextualisation the scene got where he had sex with Jules and then told her he lied about forgiving her and threw her out of his house. That was most definitely sexual assault and looking at the content notes afterwards describing it as "mildy dubious consent" feels insane. The fact it only took her like a week or two to forgive him for that and all the awfully cruel things he said felt like a violation towards the FMC and female readers in general. Especially as it's pretty obvious that power play is part of the story. I almost wished for Jules to come into the hospital with a way more serious injury, just so he would realize how much he fucked up. How did psycho Alex become the reasonable one wtf. All that kind of ruined the rest of the book for me. Otherwise it might have been a 2,5 or 3 star read.
ALSO, Ana Huang for some reason found one way to write sex scenes and just stuck to it for every character in the entire series so far? Come on, find something else than the FMC having to get on her knees or on all fours?? They can't all be into the exact same shit?? It's also always just very physically descriptive and not very emotionally intriguing?