Title: Forbidden
Written by: Tabitha Suzuma
Series: N/A
Publisher: Definition
Publish Date: May 27, 2010
Genre: YA Contemporary
Pages: 432
Source: Bought
Buy the Book: Forbidden
Synopsis: She is pretty and talented – sweet sixteen and never been kissed. He is seventeen; gorgeous and on the brink of a bright future. And now they have fallen in love. But… they are brother and sister.
Seventeen-year-old Lochan and sixteen-year-old Maya have always felt more like friends than siblings. Together they have stepped in for their alcoholic, wayward mother to take care of their three younger siblings. As defacto parents to the little ones, Lochan and Maya have had to grow up fast. And the stress of their lives—and the way they understand each other so completely—has also also brought them closer than two siblings would ordinarily be. So close, in fact, that they have fallen in love. Their clandestine romance quickly blooms into deep, desperate love. They know their relationship is wrong and cannot possibly continue. And yet, they cannot stop what feels so incredibly right. As the novel careens toward an explosive and shocking finale, only one thing is certain: a love this devastating has no happy ending. (via Goodreads)
Shaunta’s Review:
So, let me get this out of the way.
Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma is about incest. There are some brother/sister scenes in it that are difficult to read. But it’s also about so much more.
When I was in middle school in the early 1980s, I (and nearly everyone I knew) read V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic series with bated breath. That was the last time I read a book that really took on incest. Forbidden is far better written and about one million times more heartbreaking.
The easy answer is that this book is about incest, but really, it’s about so much more. And what it does well, it does so well that I actually had to put this book down several times because it was too intense for me to read in more than little sips.
When I was 15, my father went to prison and my step-mother went to a bar called The Kopper Kettle. I’m the oldest, by quite a lot, of nine kids. One sister and one brother lived with our mother. That left me, through my teenage years to care for my other six brothers and sister who were between the ages of 2 and 10.
In retrospect, it was worth it. We stayed together. We survived. I’m telling you this because, when I say that Suzuma broke my heart by absolutely nailing the experience of having to do everything you’re expected to do when you’re 16 or 17 years old, plus everything the parents of a large family are expected to do, plus find time to sleep and have some kind of a social life if you can, I want you to know that I know what I’m talking about.
Suzuma really nailed the feeling that I think is inherent in kids who find themselves in this situation, of really, really needing one relationship that is reciprocal. One relationship that feels like you’re getting as well as giving, and that gives you a light at the end of what can feel like a very, very long tunnel. I didn’t fall in love with any of my brothers (if for no other reason, they were babies), but I did fall in love with a boy who I married and had a baby with the first chance I could (but no chance of that before I was away from home, because the one thing I was most afraid of was being in my situation–pregnant.) Anyone with a pulse could have seen that he wasn’t good for me, but nothing, and I mean nothing, could have convinced me of that at the time. And that’s what Suzuma got right in this book–that feeling.
Obviously, for Lochan and Maya that light at the end of the tunnel was a train wreck in the making. I’ll be honest . . . this book rode the line of squickiness pretty closely. I personally think that it would have been just as successful if the non-traditional relationship between Lochan and Maya had been non-sexual. I felt like they fell too quickly into that, and it took away a little believability for me. Also, Lochan was so well developed as a character, and I wanted Maya to be as well. She is a 16-year-old girl with zero experience with boys, and she goes from zero to sixty too fast, especially considering the boy in question is her brother.
There were a few other things. A big one is that Lochan and Maya had shouting fights about their budding sexual relationship, often with their younger brothers and sister in the house, in the stairwells of their school, and at least once right out on the street. They didn’t lock the door. That felt contrived.
But really, none of that matters. I don’t like books without happy endings. I don’t like books that make me cry enough to give me a headache. I don’t go out looking for stories that leave me wrecked. But I loved this book, warts and all. It’s the first one I’ve read this year that reached inside of me and changed me.
