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| in the picture, the Italian edition of Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma |
You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.I've been thinking about how to start this review a hundred times I feel like, and none of those was the right one.
However I was putting it, it felt wrong and it didn't give the book justice so I left it aside and waited for better days.
It's been years since I last read this book and the feelings are still there, still strong and I do still think about it sometimes and that's when you know a book left a mark. So I sat at my desk and tried to give these feelings a sense, typing them all down, hoping for the best.
But the words I was so desperately looking for were already written down on the very cover of the book, so I took them out and wrote them down for you:
"Many will not understand your love for this book. Until they'll read it" - Waterstone's
And I could not find better words to describe it.
Tabitha Suzuma (that evil genius) wrote an incredible story.I was really sceptical if I have to be completely honest because I was so sure I wouldn't like it the way I actually did.
I was curious about reading a story where brothers fall in love, because of the oh-so-obvious taboo and the author risked to be extremely boring and sometimes heavy to digest.
Well, little spoiler, she wasn't.
She cleverly, intriguingly and shockingly lined up her web and who was I? If not a little fly attracted by the unknown...
I was caught, tortured and ended within 353 pages.
Without giving any spoiler, Lochan and Maya are brothers who love each other -not the common brotherly love but more like Jaime and Cersei from Game of Thrones love- and that's what people would call a big damn incest. Because it is, actually.But there's also more than just that.
I was caught, tortured and ended within 353 pages.
It's a love story, not an ordinary one, that's for sure, but a love story nonetheless, beautiful, spontaneous, absolutely wrong, yet, absolutely right and unavoidably addictive.
At the end of the day it's about how much you can bear, how much you can endure. Being together, we harm nobody; being apart, we extinguish ourselves
Lochan and Maya are survivors: they raise their younger sibling like they're their own kids, without a mother who is always elsewhere doing her things, leaving her children to look out for each other. And that's basically how the whole thing starts because if you are all alone in the whole world, all you need is someone to be alone with.
In the solitude of an unlived life, in fear of being caught by the social workers that could separate them, in fear of losing what's left of their messed up family, Lochan and Maya push themselves into each other's arms in a wrong way for the rest of the world but so right for them.And reading about it was completely and absolutely natural, almost like breathing.
The story of Lochan and Maya is a neverending series of curves and obstacles that end every time they're together, within the four walls of that room, until someone sees them and things get really bad.
And what you once thought was impossible, become true: you root for them; you read about their story and you just hope about a happy ending that you know (because YOU KNOW) will never come.
My advice?READ IT.
It doesn't matter if you're not into love stories; this book will make you open your eyes, it will make you think about how important is for people to have their own freedom, their own voice in this world.
It will teach you to fight for what you want and you will learn that sometimes is right to sacrifice yourself for the ones that you love.
How - how can we make it against the whole world?
Lochan and Maya have always felt more like friends than siblings. Together, they have stepped in for their unreliable, alcoholic mother to take care of their three younger siblings. The stress of their lives - and the way they understand each other so completely - has brought them closer than two siblings would ordinarily be.
So close that they have fallen in love.
Lochan and Maya know their relationship is wrong and cannot possibly continue. And yet they are powerless to stop what feels so incredibly right...