This is maybe my last spicy BookTok recommended read. I thought this book was way over the top and I had such a hard time looking past the hero’s toxic behavior in the last chapter.
Twisted Love started of promising. Our heroine is the sunshine-y Ava Chen, a college student and aspiring pro photographer. Her older brother is leaving the country for a year and asks his best friend, Alex Volkov to watch over her while he is gone. Alex—the icy 27-year-old COO a real estate development group—takes it to 11 and moves in next door to watch over Ava. Ava dislikes Alex because he is so serious and broody but then her friends come up with Operation Emotion to see if they can get Alex to show an emotion.
And I was here for it. I made a note that the book was hitting some rom com beats with the plucky Ava going up against the Aston Martin-Driving-Tom-Ford-Wearing-Broody-McBrood-Serious-Face hero.,
But then it turns out Alex was in a completely different book. He is the ruthless businessman and goes around destroying livelihoods while seeking vengeance against the man who killed his family. This stuff takes up a majority of the plot and I found it unfocused and once it gets more into the reveals it was just confusing.
TikTok is all over these morally-grey men and listen, I love a good antihero, but I need some vulnerability or character development. Otherwise they don’t read as anything more than tropes. I also can’t get past seeing the possessive (or as we called it back in my day, alphahole) behavior as anything other than abuse. At one point Ava does a boudoir photoshoot with a fellow photographer and when Alex finds out he barges in, deletes the photographs and smashes the camera—this is before he is even on friendly terms with her. It’s just…a lot.
