This is a spoiler-free review!
I am making my way through my TBR thanks to Libby now that I finally got another library card, and I am taking full advantage of it. For nearly two years I have been telling myself that I would read this book, and the hold I placed was available about an hour after I placed it. This is advertised as a dark romance, but I did not get that impression at all -- in my experience, I was expecting something more intense, but what I was presented with was a new adult romance scattered with a few clichés. The writing is truly something else -- using the term "itty bitty titty committee" in when writing a book in 2021 should be punishable by jail time.
This...surely cannot be the man y'all have been THIRSTING over?? Alex Volkov sounds insane immediately with his introduction -- he is somehow a boy genius and at the ripe age of twenty-six, he has more money and more business ideas than he knows what to do with. Despite his savvy business skills, I cannot believe that this man is a serious person, and the chapters in his perspective continue to prove my point that he is as feral as they come. Ironically enough, his vibes in the beginning of the story are very much giving Christian Grey from Temu, but at least Christian was a billionaire... At one point he literally stated "biological reactions can be mastered," and I had to take a lap around the room. The things that came out of this man's mouth had me genuinely reflecting on my life choices.
On the other hand, Ava Chen, to me, has never done anything wrong in her life ever, and anyone who even looks at her in the wrong direction is unhinged. Her older brother, Josh, is Alex's best friend, and when Josh heads off for a year of volunteer work, Ava is suddenly next door neighbors with Alex, much to her displeasure. With Ava comes a lot of mystery and a traumatic backstory that is slowly uncovered as the story progresses, and the chapters in her perspective were really interesting and enjoyable. This girl seemed to not catch a break nearly the entire book, and I was just rooting for her to have a happy moment at literally any point.
I saw a lot of people marketing this as a dark romance, but taking into account every dark romance book I have read, this did not even come close to that genre. Sure, there were elements of darker themes, mostly dealing with Alex and Ava's respective pasts, but I would not go as far to say that the overall theme of the book could be considered a dark romance. Unconventional and complicated, sure, but definitely not true dark romance. It was a story of two traumatized people dancing around their feelings for one another for nearly four hundred pages. There were these instances where Alex would suddenly want to make it very apparent that he was into BDSM but then it would not be mentioned for another eighty pages -- it could have been incorporated better into his characterization.
There are some things that Alex did that I would never have forgiven him for, but since this is a work of fiction, everything works out in the end. I do think that Ava and Alex brought out the best of each other, and their relationship allowed each of them to grow in ways that were necessary for the both of them to flourish in their relationship and in their personal lives. I wish Alex was shown to have a larger support system like Ava had, and when he mentioned how lonely he was basically all of the time, it really showed how his isolated life affected him.
Approaching the two-thirds mark is where this book becomes absolutely insane, and I felt as though I was getting whiplash by the amount of information that was revealed, and the events that were taking place. The beginning of the book is relatively mild, so the transition into more of a action-based story threw me for a loop. The final third of the book has you bouncing around with time jumps and so much happens in such a short amount of time. That being said, I low-key had an absolute blast reading this insane book, it certainly was not what I expected, but I had fun and that is what counts at the end of the day.
I had some mixed feelings about this book, going back and forth on how I felt about the overall story, but I think that if you are looking for an entry-level new adult romance with a dash of spice, Twisted Love could be the book for you. The spice scenes are certainly explicit and often enough that once a relationship forms, it takes up a decent amount of page space.
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