This is a repost of a review Suzanne wrote for Heroes & Heartbreakers. This fabulous book comes out TODAY, 11/28/17, so if you get that "OMG I NEED IT" feeling, you can read it right away! Grab some cookies and cuddle up.
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If someone asked me to describe Alisha Rai’s books, I’d say that she excels at writing three things in particular: heroines, family, and sexual tension. Her latest book, Wrong to Need You, is a great example of Rai’s strengths. The Forbidden Hearts series is full of secrets, intense emotions, and forbidden love, and features men and women who are, despite their circumstances, genuinely good people.
Sadia Ahmed is the sister-in-law of the heroine of Hate to Want You, but she’s so much more. Sadia is a single mom to six-year-old Kareem, middle of five Pakistani-American sisters, owner/manager of the Kane family cafe, bartender at O’Killian’s, and a conflicted widow. As we learn early in the book, Sadia and her late husband, Paul, were about to divorce when he died, but because she’s afraid of being seen as a failure, Sadia hasn’t told anyone. She also sort of hates running the cafe but, again, doesn’t want to sell it and be seen as a failure. Alisha Rai reliably delivers heroines who have complex inner lives and motivations, and Sadia is no exception.
If you’ve read Hate to Want You, you know that Jackson has loved Sadia since… forever. So when Jackson was falsely accused of setting fire to the C&O store and Paul and Sadia eloped? He justifiably ran away. What no one at home realized was that, while he was running, Jackson was also becoming a world-famous chef. (All of Alisha Rai’s books contain delicious food, you have been warned.) Jackson isn’t afraid of failure like Sadia, but he has resigned himself to a life without love, which is a different sort of fear, I think. When he comes back to town for his sister, Jackson has to face his decades-long love of a woman he can’t have: his sister-in-law, his childhood best friend, his sister’s best friend. To complicate things further, he’s never met his nephew, so how will that go?
The answer, of course, is for you to read and find out. The family dynamics in this book are so complex that it’s difficult to describe them without giving too much of the plot away, but for you, dear reader, I will try. Sadia is one of five sisters, and while I admit that the story was slowed down by getting to know the sisters, spouses, children, and parents, they’re remarkably well developed. (I suspect Rai has a family tree with life histories written out for each of the sisters.) Sadia’s parents are one of those long-married couples that still love each other. Her sisters are all different people, but much the same: they’re ambitious, perfectionists with a deep love of family and big hearts. They argue, they console, they’re sisters in all of the ways you can imagine. The family isn’t perfect, they’re real.
Jackson’s family, and his extended family (the Chandlers, including Hate to Want You’s Nicholas), is equally complicated. The Oka-Kanes and the Chandlers haven’t been magically “fixed” by the reunion of Livvy and Nicholas. Instead, Rai continues to knit the two families back together over the course of this second novel, leading to a conclusion that is both complete and open-ended.
My husband read this book before me and he had some strong opinions on it, mainly those that resulted in him shoving my Kindle at me and saying “read this now so we can talk about it omg.” As with any book, we both got different things from the story, but we agreed that the themes of family, grief, and forgiveness are powerful and beautiful. I’m not usually one to say this, but I think the romance was secondary to the family dynamics in this book. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
