Forbidden
Ratings46
Average rating3.8
Lochan and Maya are a brother and sister pair, raising their two younger siblings because their alcoholic mother is often absent. Because of this, Lochan and Maya grow incredibly close and eventually fall for one another. However, because of their sibling relationship, they must keep their love a secret from everyone, including their own family. Lochan and Maya struggle with their feelings while trying to grow as individuals and figure out how to maintain their inevitably doomed affair.
This book's subject matter definitely had me intrigued and worried, but once I started reading I could not put this book down. Tabitha does a good job of not forcing the sibling love at the beginning of the story. Instead, she lets it build until the middle of the book, making it far more believable and letting the reader get more attached to the characters. This book has a lot of dark themes, though, and is not a happy book at all. It does help to provide insight into how a situation like this could occur; whereas people might normally dismiss incest as “repulsive” without a second thought.
This is my 3rd re-read and the story gets more gross and disturbing every time. I wanted to read this again bc I wanted to read a really sad book and this is one of the most heartbreaking books ever.
But it does have its bad side. I can't read this without wanting to vomit. I can't support maya and lochans relationship, and I never would in real life. their relationship makes me want to vomit.
If you want to read this, yes it will be sad but be prepared to cringe and dry retch a lot!
yeah it's gonna be a no from me dawgI'm down for a book about a taboo subject. [b:All the Ugly and Wonderful Things 26114135 All the Ugly and Wonderful Things Bryn Greenwood https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500552983l/26114135.SY75.jpg 46061078] by Bryn Greenwood is one of my favorites. But this was NOT done well.The writing is cheesy & angsty and overly academic - I've never met two teenagers who speak like Lochan & Maya do. I felt like I was constantly being manipulated into thinking this relationship was okay. Lochan is obsessive and jealous and often violent. Maya read incredibly young to me, which just made the whole thing feel even weirder. Far too long with so much focus on mundane things - full pages describing waking up, making breakfast for their siblings, taking their siblings to school, being at school themselves, thinking about each other, picking up their siblings from school... I'm bored just writing this.I'm honestly having trouble expressing my thoughts because this was kind of a mess and there's so much I didn't like about it.
Honestly, the incest was the thing I had the least problems with, in theory. Everything about this book was so bad. The writing was okay sometimes, and other times it was absolutely atrocious. The dialogue was always stiff and weird. The way sex was discussed sounded like a health teacher talking about abstinence, with how frequently “loving each other emotionally” and “just wanting to touch” was brought up. All of the interactions felt so awkward and uncomfortable. All of the events that took place happened for seemingly no reason. Every event up until the end just seemed like filler to keep the story “moving,” although where in the world it was moving to, I have no idea. The characters were so stiff and strange, especially Maya. Lochan was a bit more fleshed out, but his actions frequently made no sense. Every bad thing he did went without consequence up until the end, and the end had nothing to do with the actual harmful things he'd done. Maya was so contrived and her whole character seemed to exist just so there would be an incestuous relationship. The actual relationship was honestly not believable; the two siblings obviously have a stronger bond than just brother and sister, but when they began their “relationship” they immediately just started making out and saying how much they love each other, which does not show anything besides how contrived it was. The whole thing just felt very messy and underdone; if it had gone through a few more rounds of editing or had just been constructed better, this probably would have been a better book. However, I commend the author for trying to handle this topic; I just didn't think it was good.
I feel very conflicted about this book. I didn't want to like it because of what the topic is, but I kind of did. It wasn't amazing. It wasn't bad. It was haunting. It was interesting. It was heartbreaking. Not what I expected at all. The incest portion isn't exactly romanticized. The main characters acknowledge the wrongness of it, however, they also push past the wrongness and do it anyways and it is portrayed as romantic? It's an extremely complicated book and I really have no idea how to explain it. My emotions are kind of a jumbled up, tangled, confused mess. I'm not sure how I feel about Forbidden. I just know that it's far from a forgettable novel.
This is a tough book to review, so I can't imagine how difficult it was to write.
It's rare that you see something as taboo as sibling incest portrayed in a sympathetic light (I guess unless you count stuff like Flowers in the Attic, but this book is only similar in the fact that a) incest is committed by two elder siblings that act as parents to their younger siblings, and b) they have an awful, no-good, terrible mother; there are no locked attics nor are there poisoned donuts to be found in this story) and man, did the author pull it off.
As I stated, the basic premise is this: eldest son Lochan and eldest daughter Maya take care of their three younger siblings: Kit, an angsty teenager; Tiffin, a hyperactive, sugar-addicted kid; and Willa, an adorable girl who is barely out of toddlerhood. They assume the roles of parents as their father left them several years before the novel begins, and their mother is obsessed with feeling young and beautiful, and never wanted the burden of motherhood. As Lochan and Maya are only 13 months apart in age, they have always been best friends, partners, above the mere fact that they are siblings. As Lochan enters the last year of school and pressure from his severe social anxiety and the constant threat of child services mounts, the two find themselves drawn together and admitting feelings that they have been denying for years.
I have a lot of good things to say about this novel, which of course can make for awkward conversation.
Person: Hey, read any good books lately?
Me: Yeah, there's this one I just finished, Forbidden....
Person: What's it about?
Me: . . .
Person: . . .
Me: . . .
First and foremost, the writing is pretty dang beautiful. The author particularly handles the anxiety aspect well, and I noticed this early on in the book with this passage:
I don't know when it started – this thing – but it's growing, muffling me, suffocating me like poison ivy. I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous seeping, crawling thing.
That pretty much hits the nail on the head. And really, this same type of description could easily apply to how dependent he and Maya are on one another, and he even says as such later in the book (albeit in a much more positive, romanticized way):
The human body needs a constant flow of nourishment, air, and love to survive. Without Maya, I lose all three; apart, we will slowly die.
Like I said before, this novel really makes you feel sympathy, rather than disgust, with Maya and Lochan's situation. They love each other and often say (in fact, one of my few issues with this book is that it is a little repetitive at times) that they are soul mates that happen to share the same parentage.
It's a slow burn, an emotional ride, and I for one found myself wanting a happy ending for the Whitely kids. I do wish Maya would have been given more character, as her personality seems to revolve around her devotion to Lochan. He mentions at one point, late in the novel, that Maya had childhood dreams of being an actress; perhaps I missed that fact being mentioned earlier on, but her character felt a little flat at times. I still liked her, but Lochan was given more layers and thus his sections were more compelling to me.
I do fret about Kit, though; if he was so damaged before, how is he going to cope with the fact that his actions led to the suicide of his older brother? It's not even mentioned in the epilogue, and I understand that maybe it's too much to add in at the end of the book, but I can't help but wonder.
At any rate, if you feel like reading a sympathetic portrayal of how a consensual incestuous relationship could form under difficult circumstances, I would recommend this one.
I wanted to rate this 5 stars just because I couldn't put it down. It picked up speed and I stayed up until 6 am reading. I had to force myself to walk away and sleep. I'm glad I didn't finish this right before bed. It shocked the hell out of me. Kind of gutted me. And that's why it gets 4 stars (really 4.5). I'm mad at it for making me feel the way I did.
This book played out exactly the way I thought it would, then all of a sudden it didn't. Sometimes love really screws with you and you end up being so unselfish it's actually selfish.
It was so intense. Sometimes i wanted to just scream out in frustration. i was rooting for them the entire time.
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*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?❞
