King of Wrath by Ana Huang
Genre: NA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book):
She’s the wife he never wanted…and the weakness he never saw coming. Ruthless. Meticulous. Arrogant.
Dante Russo thrives on control, both personally and professionally.
The billionaire CEO never planned to marry—
until the threat of blackmail forces him into an engagement with a woman he barely knows.
Vivian Lau, jewelry heiress and daughter of his newest enemy.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful or charming she is. He'll do everything in his power to destroy the evidence and their betrothal.
There’s only one problem: now that he has her...he can't bring himself to let her go.
***
Elegant. Ambitious. Well-mannered.
Vivian Lau is the perfect daughter and her family’s ticket into the highest echelons of high society.
Marrying a blue-blooded Russo means opening doors that would otherwise remain closed to her new-money family.
While the rude, elusive Dante isn't her idea of a dream partner, she agrees to their arranged marriage out of duty.
Craving his touch was never part of the plan.
Neither was the worst thing she could possibly do: fall in love with her future husband.
MY OPINION: ***
I've been on romance book hiatus for five months or so, since July. The last romance novel I read was by Ana Huang and somehow the first one I've read since is also by Ana Huang. I'm sorry but I had to read this one, since it just came out. It's crazy that I haven't read a romance in THAT long. It used to be my entire life but lately, I've only been sticking to school reads, classics, and some thrillers and literary fiction here and there.
I remember why I love romance. While this one wasn't my favorite, I read it in the span of 1.5 days. Most of the classics I've been reading that aren't on audiobook take me over a week. However, romances always fly by which is part of the reason I love them so much. I also just love the stories. Yes, we get the same tropes every single time. Yes, every single rom-com man is tall, strong, muscular, hot, kind, dreamy, and sarcastic. But I will eat it up.
I will say that I wasn't the biggest fan of this one. At least, not to the point that I expected to be. I was looking forward to some ungodly book because of how hyped up this one was. However, I enjoyed it enough to where I didn't want to give up but it wasn't the best thing of all time.
It's a forced-marriage, billionaire romance. I am not the biggest fan of those tropes but they definitely aren't on my list of hated cliches. I haven't read one of these in a while so it was definitely refreshing. I will say that my biggest critique was of how much reduce/reuse/recycle Ana seemed to use for this book. She took entire scenes from the Twisted series and put them in here and just told them from the perspective of another character. While I understand that it's in the same timeline and same universe as that series, I don't really want to read the same scenes over and over from different POVs, especially since they weren't even the most interesting scenes of the other books.
She also repeated a lot of phrases several times. The man, Dante, is literally a carbon copy of all of her other men in the books she's written. He's "hot, handsome, smoldering, godly, muscular, murderous, etc etc etc." Oh and RICH. I'm honestly getting sick of the billionaire thing. There's no way all of these like 20-30 year old men are ungodly filthily rich and have every single person at their whim to do their bidding. Like, be for real.
At least our female protagonists are sort of different from each other. This one follows Vivian, an Asian-American (also filthy rich) woman who struggles to come to terms with her own independence and identity apart from her parents' expectations forced on her. I actually really enjoyed reading from Vivian's POV because I could resonate a lot with her. I am also an Asian American female (though not filthy rich) and I do feel that a lot of times, I change myself or my wishes to please my family or adhere to tradition. I definitely do not do so to the extent that Vivian does but her arguments about tradition and the cultural gaps between her and Dante that don't allow him to understand her struggles are very realistic.
I will say I wasn't really feeling the chemistry in this one. They are an arranged marriage turned real-lovers but to be quite honest, I didn't really see a shift from when they went from "fake" to "real." The way they spoke about each other from page one kind of makes me think it was never fake?? I don't think that was the point but I just didn't really see the real sparks between them. I wanted the tension to build up until they both saw past their stupidity and realized they loved each other but eh. It didn't happen.
I was very interested to read more from Ana because I did enjoy the Twisted series. I don't think this was better or necessarily worse than those. It's definitely giving the same energy so if you enjoyed those, definitely check this one out.
Main Character: Vivian, Dante
Sidekick(s): Friends, family
Villain(s): Misunderstandings, tradition, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This was a contemporary romance.
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