I thought, that after reading Twisted Hate, I had turned a real corner with Ana Huang’s books. I really did enjoy that book, after not liking the first two books in the Twisted series, and I believed that only could things could come from there.
Boy, was I wrong.
Twisted Lies was one of my most anticipated reads of 2022––after seeing the teasers of Christian and Stella in the previous books, I was beyond excited…only to be severely disappointed.
My issue with Ana Huang’s books, is that almost all of them feel the exact same? All of her heroes (except Josh) are carbon copies of each other, that at times, I have a hard time distinguishing them, and this issue was only exacerbated in her newest release, King of Wrath.
King of Wrath follows Dante Russo, a billionaire CEO who is forced into an arranged marriage with Vivian Lau, a jewelry heiress, and daughter of his newest enemy. Neither sees this marriage as more than a business contract, but the more time they spend together, the quicker they start to fall for each other.
I understand that Ana Huang wrote this book along the same time that she wrote Twisted Lies (the last book in the Twisted Series) which is perhaps, why they were so similar, but as someone who DNF’d Twisted Lies, I found it incredibly difficult to sit through this one. The similarities between the books were too great for me to ignore––they were both fake dating/fake marriage, forced proximity trope, grumpy alpha hero…it sort of felt like reading the same book over and over again. Which I wouldn’t completely hate, if I actually liked the book.
It’s not that I don’t like a grumpy, alpha hero with a soft spot for his girl, but at this point, it is such an overdone trope that unless it’s executed brilliantly, I just feel meh, about it all. And out of the five Ana Huang books that I have read, four of the five heroes are literal copies of each other. I can’t tell the difference between them! And I’m thinking that this is the reason that the only book by her that I’ve really enjoyed was Twisted Hate––Josh was the only hero who was unique. It is hard to really care about your hero, when he has no other personality trait, other than being grumpy.
There are a total of seven books, in Ana Huang’s new series! If each of the books is going the same route as this one, I definitely will not be staying tuned. That being said, I know this a billionaire CEO series, so I would love to see a role reversal, with a female billionaire. This is only the first book in the series, so there definitely is room to grow.
The last thing that I will say, is that I’ve noticed that with each book she releases, Ana Huang’s writing, and storytelling ability has significantly improved. Especially with this release, her writing felt a lot more sophisticated than some of her previous works. Though almost none of her stories have truly worked for me, I am excited to see where this series goes.
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