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3.5 stars! Spoiler free review!
TW: detailed hospice care, death of a loved one, brief suicidal ideation, verbally abusive family
You can’t go into this book expecting your average happy, sweet, romance. Yes, it does have the algorithm that ultimately ends in a happy ending like the romance genre defines, but this book hits harder than the other books in the Kiss Quotient collection.
Character development focused > romance
It delves into deeper topics such as recovering from cancer, dealing with abusive/gaslighting family members, and figuring out your own emotional and mental health.
The romance is still very much present, it’s still amazing and emotional, but it’s also a lot more difficult because both characters are going through so much development. Because of that I’d say the romance also sits more on the back burner to allow the characters to show their own separate lives and their own character arcs.
The synopsis says it best when it comes to Anna: “tragedy strikes Anna’s family she takes on a role that she is ill-suited for, until the burden of expectations threatens to destroy her”
For Quan, he’s the type to be as soft and loving on the inside as scary and hardened as he appears on the outside. His love for Anna is on another level, but it’s a love that he has to fight for.
Their romance is rocky, but one worth reading. It’s almost difficult to get all the feels of this book into words because it feels like SO MUCH happens, but it’s just great and Helen Hoang handles such difficult topics so well.
The reason it fell to 3.5 stars for me is mostly that I wasn’t ready for such a heavy romance at the time. I still enjoyed it overall, but it didn’t leave me with the same butterflies that Kiss Quotient did.
REP REP REP :)
Neurodivergent representation in all the Kiss Quotient books: autism!
Asian representation in all the Kiss Quotient books, too!
A heavier romance, but still a good one! (I liked all the books in the collection, Kiss Quotient being my fave!)
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