Review: It's a nice love to visit, but I wouldn't want to live in it
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 8, 2013
Reading Forbidden Passion I felt the characters come alive. I understood their situations and the feelings of liking someone you shouldn't all too well, of dealing with inappropriate feelings and desperately trying to channel them into something else entirely, something more productive and feasible. ("It was endless...and hellish," one woman thinks as she longs for someone who is emotionally and logistically out of reach.) Yearning for the impossible and having it somehow happen (eventually) is often a favorite theme of mine, especially in romantic fiction.But everything here that makes this a gripping read also makes it a frustrating one: two completely different people connect unexpectedly and then spend the rest of the novel coming together and separating, coming together and separating, the one woman totally committed to understanding and accepting how aloof, and even cold-hearted, the other woman (the love of her life) is, both of them often behaving in a way that makes you want to yell a little.We suffer for love, surely, and many of us would do most anything to get and keep it. Yet I found the dynamics between Kim and Sonja often very exhausting. Not a lot of people would put up with the nonsense Kim does. She's either a fool or exactly the kind of person you'd want to be in a relationship with.Crisp yet heartfelt writing, great dialogue and fully fleshed out characters keep what should have been a ludicrous plot a very compelling one. Another selling point for me is the uncomfortably realistic attitude that desperately trying not to acknowledge how you feel about someone can be a twenty-four hour a day job. In a way the very things that made me uncomfortable with Forbidden Passions were the things that kept me reading.