Forbidden

Read this and other reviews at Fictionally Inclined!

*4.5 STARS

Holy cow. This book. This book. It was one of the most powerful, intense stories I've read in a long time. I finished it twenty minutes ago, and I still have swollen eyes and a throbbing head from crying. I am going to try my best to explain this book, though it is going to be challenging.

I did not go into this book expecting sunshine and rainbows, obviously. You can tell from the cover and the summary that it's not going to be a happy story. And it wasn't. This book was far from an “easy” read. Everything about it was difficult. Maya and Lochan were basically raising their three little siblings on their own, despite still being in school themselves. The way the tedium and stress weighed them down and how the whole situation was dealt with is just heartwrenchingly realistic. The story is told in alternating POV - one chapter is from Maya's perspective, the next from Lochan's, etc. Lochan's chapters were particularly difficult to read because of all the issues he had. Then you have the nature of their relationship itself. I did not find this quite as repelling as many others might - just as a warning, if you couldn't tell from the summary, it is blatant incest - because I'm just weird that way, I guess. (Just as a disclaimer, lest you think I'm some sort of incest-crazy freak, I do not actually support incest as a practice in real life, despite my liking of a few fictional incestuous pairings.). But the codependence, the seriously twisted factors behind the relationship, the intensity between the two, everything was nearly overwhelming. Thinking back, I cannot believe I read it in one sitting; it seems like the kind of thing that would need to be spaced out if only to give yourself some time to breathe in between. Yet I could not put the book down (well, metaphorically, since I was reading it on ebook).

Suzuma's work is absolutely stunning. First of all, she did a marvelous job with the storyline. She presented the relationship and characters in a nearly hauntingly realistic way. She addressed the issues behind the taboo and illegality of the practice of incestuous relationships. One of the things I found most impressive of all was simply the writing itself. A lot of times with alternating POVs, I've found that while the voice changes, the writing does not tend to. Yet with her, you could feel whose head you were in. In the voice, the word choice, the length of the sentences and paragraphs. The way she crafted the evolving relationship was perfect, from the acutal happenings to the reactions and realizations of both Maya and Lochan. The scenes when things are first coming to a head between them gave me goosebumps, even made me tear up because I was so conflicted, right along with them. The writing was consistently good, but every once in a while, there would just a line that was so powerful. For instance, this one:

❝I mean, at the end of the day, what the hell does it matter who I end up with if it can't be you?❞