ALC Review: Twisted Love by Ana Huang
Release date: 29 April 2021 Original Release, 6 June 2022 Rerelease/Audio release
Rating: 2.5 stars
Narrators: Cindy Kay, Aiden Snow
Synopsis: He has a heart of ice...but for her, he'd burn the world.
Alex Volkov is a devil blessed with the face of an angel and cursed with a past he can’t escape.
Driven by a tragedy that has haunted him for most of his life, his ruthless pursuits for success and vengeance leave little room for matters of the heart.
But when he’s forced to look after his best friend’s sister, he starts to feel something in his chest:
A crack.
A melt.
A fire that could end his world as he knew it.
***
Ava Chen is a free spirit trapped by nightmares of a childhood she can’t remember.
But despite her broken past, she’s never stopped seeing the beauty in the world…including the heart beneath the icy exterior of a man she shouldn’t want.
Her brother’s best friend.
Her neighbor.
Her savior and her downfall.
Theirs is a love that was never supposed to happen—but when it does, it unleashes secrets that could destroy them both…and everything they hold dear.
Twisted Love is a brother’s best friend/opposites attract romance with a hint of suspense. It's book one in the Twisted series but can be read as a standalone.
WARNING: This book contains a possessive, morally gray alphahole; explicit sexual content, and profanity. No cheating or menage, but if you're looking for a traditionally sweet, loveable hero, this is not the book for you. Recommended for 18+.
Review
“You want the world to think you have no heart when in reality, you have a multi-layered one. A heart of gold encased in a heart of ice. And the one thing all hearts of gold have in common: they crave love.”
Alex Volkov, our alpha male, has a memory that helps him remember things very well. Unfortunately for him, his memory is not a gift, as he remembers quite vividly a tragic event that orphaned him when he was young and left him closed off from the world and seemingly heartless to boot.
Ava Chen also experienced trauma in her childhood, but she can’t remember it in her waking life; her dreams, however, terrorize her at night. She is Alex’s polar opposite, sunshine to his thunderstorms, pink to his black, yada yada, etc.
After her brother, Josh, leaves for a year to complete a medical residency in a far-off country, he leaves Ava’s safety in Alex’s reluctant hands, and Josh has him move into his home next to Ava’s for extra measure. It doesn’t take long before Alex cracks like an egg under Ava’s little optimistic intrusions, though she was incredibly manipulative in doing so. With her friends’ help, she weasles her way into Alex’s heart and falls for him herself. It helps that they’ve known each other since childhood, but I can’t help thinking the pretenses that lead to the relationship and those that plague it for the entirety of the book are unhealthy for any relationship. It is a romance book though, and it is fiction, so I suspended my disbelief.
Speaking of suspension of disbelief, the dialogue and many of the situations in the book were hard to overlook. Alex has a lot of money and uses it as convenient solutions for his problems, but the solutions are far-fetched and lack real-world application and believability. It got better as the book progressed, but not much.
As for plot, I enjoyed the tandem backstories and their mysteries. The tragedies that contribute to each character’s issues resolve themselves okay for me. I like Ava’s storyline better than Alex’s; his problems are much larger and require a bit more development for me. If you like descriptive, raunchy sex that’s borderline BDSM, this book is for you. It reminds me quite a bit of 50 Shades of Grey with the rich alpha male who has possession issues. The dominance is a bit less stalkery in this one, but it still smacks of abuse, and I cringed a bit.
The narrators for this were so/so. Alex’s voice was very deep and vibrated the speakers on my headphones, making my ear canals itch terribly. Ava’s voice was high, and to me sounded less like an adult and more like a teenager. The voices for each character weren’t as differentiated as I’m used to, so it was, though not difficult, a bit harder than usual for me to keep up with the characters speaking.
My thanks to Tantor audio via Libro.fm for the ALC, for which I willingly give my own, honest opinion.