A review by mikideez
Forever with You by Laurelin Paige

1.0

So I'm used to books like this having girlfriends forgive sort of borderline behavior with varying degrees of believability. But for her to forgive him, after how he broke her...while it's believable in the real world that there are people who are broken enough that they would do that, we don't want to see that in romance. Yes, we want the couple to get together in the end. Yes, we want the male lead to redeem himself for his horrid behavior that he occasionally engaged in throughout the book (which is typically limited to relatively mild jerk behavior, and he is typically redeemed by a proportionate amount of time spent addressing the situation). What we don't want is for our male lead to have spent his life psychologically torturing people until they broke (which, while I get that this used to be Twilight fanfic and is supposed to be the equivalent of Edward feeding on people when he was first changed, goes too far even for that comparison). And we 100% do not want to find out that he met our female lead playing one of these twisted games. That is textbook unforgivable, whatever his motives were, both for the reader and for Lacie. And him spending a month pining for her and getting back into therapy is not enough to fix it.

I guess I'm just tired of seeing abusive behavior written as romantic. We have far too many women living through this in real life; too many of us have experienced it in real life. We don't want to read it in escapist fiction.