Is Twisted Love really worth the hype?
Sometimes, light books are the way to go. And what better light book than romance? They’re quick, easy reads, and, at best, just an enjoyable mood-setter. At worst, though? Absolute mind-rot material. Take Twisted Love by Ana Huang for example.
Viscerally cringy, flat, and hair-pull-inducing, Twisted Love is the book equivalent of those mass-produced ripoff soap operas. The world-building gives us nothing; the characters give us nothing; and the dialogue? I wanted to jettison myself off to space. I find it shocking that somebody woke up, sat down, and thought it would be a good day to release these fledgling lines to the world:
“You’re about to find out what happens when you invite yourself into the lion’s den.”
“Don’t try to humanize me. I’m not a tortured hero from one of your romantic fantasies.”
And, saving the worst for the last:
“I’m trying to save you, Ava.”
Ana Huang, Twisted Love
“From what?”
“From me.”
Do I need to say more about this? Every one of these lines read like the author was trying too hard to appeal to TikTok—or BookTok, to be precise. It worked, but at what cost? Our male lead doesn’t seem like a male anymore. He just seems like a badly written parody of a man written by a woman who has never even been in close proximity with a man.
After all, the male lead Alex Volkov, a genius with an IQ of 160, possessing a god-like body and a face sculpted by the hands of Michelangelo, essentially functioning as the COO of a company at the age of 14, simply falls in love with the blandest girl in existence. Oh, and he’s a billionaire.
Plot
The entire plot of this book was stupid. Everything was unbelievably cheesy, especially the “plot twist” of the main girl’s father somehow playing a role in the murder-mystery aspect of this novel and Alex’s uncle, the CEO of the company, being behind it all.
How could you not anticipate this “turn of events”? It was so lackluster, but you can’t even read it for the romance plot either, since the characters are so flat, cliched, and just contrived in general. Alex’s constant act of being the wounded yet broodingly intense character ruined the smut that was there. Some call this a trope, but I see it as attention-seeking behavior: it’s so overdone that reading it becomes painful and just a major source of secondhand embarrassment at this point.
Please, please, please spare your brain cells and time and just avoid this book. Whatever you’re looking for, you won’t find it here.
~1 star
