Title: Hate to Want You Series: Forbidden Hearts #1
Author: Alisha Rai
Published: July 25, 2017
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 371
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:One night. No one will know.
That was the deal. Every year, Livvy Kane and Nicholas Chandler would share one perfect night of illicit pleasure. The forbidden hours let them forget the tragedy that haunted their pasts—and the last names that made them enemies.Until the night she didn’t show up.
Now Nicholas has an empire to run. He doesn’t have time for distractions and Livvy’s sudden reappearance in town is a major distraction. She’s the one woman he shouldn’t want . . . so why can’t he forget how right she feels in his bed?
Livvy didn’t come home for Nicholas, but fate seems determined to remind her of his presence—and their past. Although the passion between them might have once run hot and deep, not even love can overcome the scandal that divided their families.
Being together might be against all the rules . . . but being apart is impossible.
The corner of Romancelandia I tend to stay in has rarely embraced a book or author so unanimously as it has Alisha Rai and all of her Forbidden Hearts trilogy—but especially the first book, Hate to Want You. And, I must admit, even as an Extremely Hype-Adverse Reader, I managed to get on board with this. All of this is amazing. Rarely have I read a contemporary romance that seems to get everything right (which is why I tend to read historicals). But friends, I am willing to wholeheartedly certify that Hate to Want You is the full package.
ROMEO AND JULIET, BUT BETTER
If you know anything about this book, you’ve probably seen this pitched as a modernized, sexy take on Romeo and Juliet. Which isn’t too far off the mark. The book’s leads, Livvy and Nicholas, were both raised as wealthy children whose grandfathers had founded a large-scale grocery chain in the region. However, due to ~circumstances~ when they were in their early 20s, the two families had a major falling out, and Livvy and Nicholas’s relationship failing was just another symptom of that. They broke up, spectacularly.
Jump to ten years later, and Rai has established a pretty plausible “forbidden love” scenario. Sometimes stories like this seem silly, because the reasons the couple can’t be together aren’t legit, but with Hate to Want You, I totally bought into it. The family dysfunction (on both sides) is amped up way high, and it was super interesting to see how the two of them navigated that dynamic in order to reach their HEA.
SECOND CHANCE ROMANCE! EXCEPT…NOT
At this point, it’s probably common knowledge that second chance romances are my favorites. Hate to Want You is one…sort of? I mean, Nicholas and Livvy were together, and then they broke up, and now they’re back in close proximity, headed towards an HEA, so all the earmarks of the trope are there. It’s just that I’ve never really seen second chance romance play out the way it does here. Rai does something different from what I’m used to, and I liked it.
For one thing, it’s not as if the two leads haven’t seen each other in all the intervening years since they broke up. Rather, for the past ten years, Livvy has sent Nicholas a text message on her birthday, giving him a location for him to meet her so they can fuck each other silly, no strings. (Why either of them thought that was healthy behavior is beyond me.) So, though they haven’t been together for a long time, there has been “casual” sex going on. Which I maybe wasn’t a fan of, but only because it just seemed like a really stupid thing for both characters to do. That being said, I think this book is very much about unhealthy behaviors and breaking away from them, so I think it was important to Rai’s overall narrative.
Another aspect of Hate to Want You that was different from the usual progression of the second chance trope is how the leads felt about each other, i.e. the complexity of Nicholas and Livvy’s emotions. Rai deals very well with emotional intricacy and doesn’t ever allow anything to be simple. This is realistic, but makes for a prickly relationship at times, because there often doesn’t seem to be a clear way forward. I loved this—the story here is rich, layered, and dark. There are a lot of feelings being thrown about or being suppressed, and it’s intense, but very real in a way I’m not used to, in any type of romance.
MENTAL HEALTH REALNESS
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen a book engage so directly with mental health as Hate to Want You does. The female protagonist, Livvy, has chronic depression that she’s dealt with since high school, and it appears that her mother does as well. Rai doesn’t just mention Livvy’s depression in an aside, rather, it’s brought into the center. All of Livvy’s feelings and doubts and insecurities are confronted and discussed, in a way that I found very refreshing.
Rai also goes into a discussion of how women have to do much of the heavy lifting in relationships, emotionally speaking, and how this contributes to women’s feelings of worthlessness, etc. That is an issue I’ve been dying to see brought up in a romance novel, and the fact that this book brought that reality out into the spotlight was surprising and hard-hitting in the best way.
Conversely, Nicholas has issues with rejecting emotions, deadening his feelings, and over-controlling his behaviors. Mental abuse from his father and other aspects of his life have lead him to be a very reserved, closed-off person. While different from Livvy’s issues, Nicholas isn’t necessarily very healthy here, and I appreciated that being touched on.
Regardless of one’s background or circumstance, mental health issues are always relevant, and I was delighted that they were approached in this story in a major way.
ALSO: SEXYTIMES
It’s also worth nothing that Hate to Want You is hot. Like, hot-hot. Smokin’ hot. I was a few pages in and I read “dick” and “pussy” in the same sentence and was like “OKAY BUCKLE YOUR SEATBELTS, THIS IS IT” and damn, I was not wrong. I also really appreciate a man who loves to eat his lady out. Gold star.
So, in short: this book is the shit. It’s dark, mature, complicated, sexy, and emotional. Sometimes, the hype machine knows what it’s about.
