Author: Ana Huang
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Fiction
Personal Rating: ⭐⭐ / ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (2 out of 5 stars)
Trigger warning(s): suicide, self-harm, children abuse
This book feels like a teenage girl’s introduction to p*rn, only a little bit elevated. The characters are close to one-dimensional. The events in the storyline have too many coincidences that almost every scene was predictable, and they were obviously led there through offensively obvious plot devices. But the sexual intensity gradually increases so you continue reading, but the payoff did not have enough climax.
Plot
Let’s run this story down.
Ava is standing at a bus stop in a dangerous part of town. It’s raining, she can’t book an Uber, and she’s running late for her brother’s sendoff party. She calls her brother to pick her up but her brother enlists the help of his best friend, Alex, instead. In this car ride, we learn more about Alex and Ava’s dynamics. They’ve known each other through Ava’s brother, Josh, but they’re not really close despite (a) Alex spending Thanksgiving with them for eight years now, and (b) Ava and Josh living next to each other on campus and Alex supposedly being Josh’s previous roommate. In fact, despite these things, they’re not even in a neutral relationship. There’s a little animosity due to their opposite personalities. Alex is the ice-cold, brooding guy that only entertains a specific type of woman – someone who can handle his sexual desire to dominate. Of course, Ava is your typical optimistic, supposedly naive, best-friend-to-all type of damsel.
Since he’s leaving for a year, Josh asks Alex to watch over his sister on the grounds that Ava has a stalker ex whom she broke up with around a couple of months ago. Alex reluctantly agrees and moves into Josh’s house beside Ava even though he no longer studies there and is actually already a COO of a company in another state. Despite their rocky relationship, Ava would extend the olive branch because her friends made up an experiment to try and squeeze several emotions from Alex for fun and it was Ava’s job to test those out. She gave him cookies and on her second attempt, she went to his house to watch tragic love movies to try to make him sad. She fell asleep, and they slept in the same bed. Nothing happened.
From there they would ‘coincidentally’ see each other around parties, and get to know their traumas, eventually leading to a sexual encounter showing Alex’s taste in bed and Ava enjoying her submissive role. They would enter into a relationship, dig up childhood traumas that would throw plot twists in the story, and there would be a big fight then and an eventual happy ending.
Analysis
It’s a very obvious trope but I typically won’t have a problem with that except that the execution in this felt too simple. Here are my problems with this.
- First off, the characters are both so one-dimensional and flimsy at the same time.
- Alex.
- He was initially portrayed well as this stoic genius with an alpha air. But then later in the story, his big, romantic gesture is to sing to Ava at a public art show? That just seems too out of character. I get that it’s meant to show his vulnerability, but there could’ve been other grand gestures that show vulnerability and did not involve money so that the main alpha vibe that he had on for literally decades remained intact. In fact, I really liked that he was earning Ava’s trust back by him just showing up to her flat every day and essentially being her chaperone and assistant tirelessly. Because that didn’t involve money, that involved consistency and sincerity and that would’ve been poetic enough. It was well within the realistic character progression because he’s always been possessive. I can give a pass to all his red flags not being addressed because teenage girls get crazily in love with possessive fictional men and it’s well within character, but Alex being publicly vulnerable? No, I don’t buy it.
- Second, I don’t understand the level of his intensity to protect Ava so early. It came to a point so early in the book where he saw Ava at an alumni party and he was angry because she wasn’t supposed to be there. He also tracked her down when she didn’t respond for hours even though they didn’t have this relationship before? It’s just… too soon and too intense with no foundation other than a promise to his best friend.
- Ava is the most inconsistent character in this book for multiple reasons.
- She claims to want to have nothing to do with Alex as she literally said ‘NO’ multiple times when she saw him moving to his brother’s house next door YET gets coaxed into her friends’ experiments even though there are no stakes in it. There’s literally no incentive for her to get closer to him yet she does BUT finds it irritating when Alex does things to ‘protect’ her. Yes, they’re out of line, but she doesn’t stand her ground about her boundaries either. She feels comfortable enough to push Alex’s personal boundaries by running his palm on his back as their initial physical contact EVEN THOUGH her entire narrative before that part was that Alex always makes her nervous. Why would you touch someone you claimed you’re too nervous to be around? It’s like you’re claiming to be weak and strong whenever it’s convenient.
- She’s supposed to be this good person and yet she’s so narcissistic to the point where she audibly says ‘I tried to be a good person. A good daughter, a good girlfriend… but no matter how hard I tried, I always ended up hurt.” She literally said she didn’t love her ex. She’s supposed to be the person who gives people the benefit of the doubt and yet her inner processing of what happens to her relationships is ‘I did everything but everyone failed me?’ What?
- She’s also switching between being soft and strong whenever the plot suited it. She’s supposed to be this sweet girl who has nightmares and gets taken care of by everyone around her but when confronted by a model, millionaire girl who used to sleep with Alex in this girl’s own mansion, she claps back by telling to her face that she got dumped without hesitation.
- She’s also supposed to be this independent girl too. The first time I actually liked and cheered for her was when she gave Alex the cold shoulder and told him straight that she was not going to be the type to run after him, but then he’s only late a few minutes on a date and she throws a tantrum? She’s become so emotionally dependent on him that when Alex was acting weird she showed up in his apartment unannounced and forced her way in despite Alex saying that it isn’t the best time? She didn’t want to give him space until Alex’s visitor came and she realized she was out of line.
- The side characters were one-dimensional. Ava had a princess friend who was the most humble person she’s ever met, a best friend who pushes her to do more non-innocent things, another friend who was almost always out of the picture, an overprotective brother, and an emotionally distant father. She has a highly threatening ex so she could be saved by Alex. Alex has a model-like ex-fling who happens to fall for him so bad that she’s your typical villain who attacks Ava so Alex can save her again. It just goes on and on. You can pretty much guarantee that once a character has been introduced you already know their place in the story.
- Alex.
- Second, the pacing of some of the parts feels a bit off. I felt that some of the scenes were written that way and everything before and after was made to fit that scene. That’s a common thing to do, sure, but readers are not supposed to feel that.
- For example, early on in the book, Alex discovered Ava to be in the same alumni party and he steals her for a dance and they have this deep conversation. Alex criticizes her for being so naive and for craving love. Ava tells him she knows he’s a good person and he has ‘layers.’ It was so out of nowhere. It was too early, nothing much happened to justify those convictions with each other. Then, later in the car, they try to talk but Ava says somewhere along the lines of ‘Let’s not ruin the rest of the night.’ What rest of the night? You just happened to attend the same event together and are going home because you live next to each other. You weren’t on a date. But that line had to be there to have an excuse to go on a date. Because the distraction ended up being a casual dinner to have more deep conversations.
- Another example is Ava’s ex, Liam. We don’t even get a fair third-party fight. Nope, he was unapologetically a cheater. Then, all of a sudden turned out to be a drug addict and a violent person even though Ava herself said that he wasn’t like that during their relationship. Of course, he had to be so smitten to stalk her. He and the other potential third party, Madeline, had to be flat-out evil so we don’t root for anyone other than Alex and Ava.
- Speaking of one-dimensional, the other evil people in the book turn out to be the adults around Ava and Alex’s life. There wasn’t even an attempt to cover their intentions by making them act more ‘fatherly’ around Alex and Ava. Nope, just outright cold and bad influence so the plot twists involving them two no longer surprised me. Even Ava’s father’s character was inconsistent. Despite not liking Ava and Alex he drove to another state towards Alex’s building AND confessed his sinister acts in a confession format? He’s literally the adult in this scenario, if he had the pride that was established early in the books he wouldn’t have done that by just Ava insisting that something’s ‘important.’
- The way to wrap up the complications around Ava’s life is Alex’s wealthy influence to get the people he wants to be locked up, lose their jobs, dismantle their companies, and apparently, even restrict Ava from getting a restraining order against him in another country. Too convenient.
Final Thoughts
I really wanted to like this book. I saw this recommended in a book group I was a member of and they raved about how good the series was. Granted, the spicy scenes really were worth the read even though the long buildup really didn’t make the first scene worth it. For Alex to claim that he demands so much in the bedroom, their first sexual encounter was a letdown. But the subsequent scenes made up for it, I think.
In this book, I can overlook the red flags of their relationships such as Ava’s inability to build boundaries on how Alex treats men around her and Alex’s obsessive and controlling manners because it’s catering to a certain demographic. However, the lack of character depth and the off flow of the story due to multiple plot devices that are obviously thrown for the purpose of moving the plot along really made it feel like this is just supposed to be a book p**n. But if it was meant to be that, then it’s also not too intense of a read because the scenes are so short. They literally just say they’ve done it multiple times in the span of days just to emphasize that they have an active s*x life.
I honestly think that this was intended to be this surface-level and the whole point of the book was the spice. The characters are calling themselves out on how cheesy and inconsistent they are. Ava tells herself that she doesn’t know why she’s suddenly brave to confront Madeline, she calls herself out knowing she’s the one who keeps putting herself in Alex’s house, and Alex tells himself how cliche it is that he’s running to the airport to catch the woman she loves. But calling these things out doesn’t make the writing better.
I still want to give the benefit of the doubt that maybe I’m just no longer a fan of contemporary romance. Maybe I’m just not the target demographic reader, either. Maybe it’s really meant more for women in their early twenties. I’m not sure. I’ll give the rest of the series a chance. I’ve heard that the sequel was much better.
Favorite Quote(s):
“Just because things could be worse didn’t mean they don’t suck.”
― Ava Chen, Twisted Love
“If you let lesser people determine your self-worth, you’ll never reach higher than their limited imagination.”
― Alex Volkov, Twisted Love
The Stray Reader 
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