Full Review by Lupe Farkas

When you pick up a romance, you usually know how it’s going to end.

That’s part of the comfort of it.

It’s a little like finishing everything on your to-do list knowing there’s a reward waiting for you at the end. The destination isn’t really the point.

I read along while listening to the audiobook, and at some point I simply gave up pretending I was going to do anything else with my day.

I was staying there.

With Jasmine.

With all the tension.

With all the feelings.

With these two people who desperately needed to sit down and have one proper conversation before I personally climbed inside the book and forced them to do it.

This book made me laugh, hurt my feelings just enough, got my adrenaline going and then wrapped everything in this incredibly warm, dreamy atmosphere that made me want to stay inside the story.

And that was probably my favourite thing about it.

It wasn’t emotional damage in the someone please remove my heart from the floor sense.

It was the softer kind.

The longing.

The almosts.

The little moments that make you smile like an idiot.

The feeling of watching two people gradually work their way toward something you desperately want them to have.

And underneath the romance, there is such a lovely sense of family and belonging.

That cosy feeling mattered to me much more than I expected. The people around the central romance made the world feel lived-in rather than existing solely to push two characters together.

I also loved how modern the story felt.

I always enjoy seeing characters whose work actually resembles the world we live in now: YouTubers, creators, people working online and, in Jasmine’s case, a podcaster.

As a podcaster myself, I immediately connected with some of Jasmine’s anxieties around her work. That little detail made her feel even more real to me.

And then there are the intimate scenes.

They’re passionate and sensual without feeling exaggerated or inserted simply because romance apparently requires everyone to suddenly lose their minds every thirty pages.

The intimacy actually feels connected to the relationship.

That makes such a difference.

And the audiobook?

Her narration made Jasmine feel like somebody telling me her story rather than a character being read to me. That intimacy is one of the reasons I ended up listening for hours without wanting to stop.

By the end, Jasmine didn’t feel like somebody I had simply read about.

She felt like the friend who had sat across from me and told me everything.

Her fears.

Her mistakes.

Her hopes.

The things she wished she had said.

And the person she loved.

That feeling is rare for me.

And then the ending arrived.

The reward.

Exactly the one I had been waiting for.

I closed the book ridiculously happy.

Sometimes I want a book to emotionally destroy me.

Sometimes I want darkness and chaos and women making catastrophic decisions.

And sometimes I just want a romance that lets me disappear into somebody else’s life for a while and leaves me feeling warm when I come back.

Make Me Hate You did exactly that.