Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

It seems fitting that we start this post with Stephanie Perkin’s Amazon review. Perkins is, of course, one of our favorite writers of swoon, and yet here we are recommending a very hard, very non-swoony book. It’s perfect to us because it shows the depth and breadth of the literature available to adults and young adults. In a wonderfully concise review, Perkins has captured the brilliance that is Forbidden.

Tabitha Suzuma has crafted a harrowing, sexy, heart wrenching, and heartbreaking masterwork about one of our last remaining taboos. Lochan and Maya are the oldest children of an alcoholic, absentee mother. The burden of raising their three younger siblings has fallen upon them, and they have been forced to mature into parents. As their friendship is strengthened, and as they become dependent upon one another for survival, their parental relationship develops into a new stage: romantic love.

An alternating first-person narration immerses the reader deep inside the hearts of the characters. Suzuma takes great care to help us understand how such a situation could arise and allows us to be sympathetic for it–even root for it–though we know, just as Lochan and Maya know, that the future of a Happily Ever After is unlikely.

This is a powerful novel about love in all of its forms. About teenagers forced to become adults, and about children forced to acknowledge new parents. Particularly stressful is the second oldest boy, Kit, whose every appearance carries an impending sense of disaster.

Forbidden never let me set it down. It never let me stop worrying. And it never let me stop hoping for the best. –Stephanie Perkins

As you can see, Forbidden isn’t a book that is appropriate for our Swoony Recs page. The characters may be any number of wonderful things, but the categories we save for this site—our fun zone—don’t fit this book at all. Lochan is truly wonderful but it feels shallow to call him swoony. Maya is amazing, but ‘badass’ feels much too light-hearted. And although we’ve both gone back and reread particularly powerful passages, we probably couldn’t handle a complete re-read in any near future. However, for both of us, Forbidden goes straight to the top of the favorites pile.

The problem is that we can’t in good conscience really recommend Forbidden to anyone. It’s like telling someone to go watch Ponette or La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful). Wonderful, sure. But it hurts, and it’s hard, and here the subject matter is both devastating and a little cringey.

Still, it’s hard to not recommend it, to want to share it with everyone we know, discuss and then relish the heartache together. Even though it didn’t fit our usual campy content, this book has hit us so hard and so fiercely it felt weird to not bring it to this site. Forbidden is beautifully crafted and executed. We both read it in a single, sleepless night, and then sobbed together the following day.

We are so hammered by our love for this book and so many of our expectations were dissolved away when we read. The characters are deeply, richly drawn, so intimate and real, that we hurt when they hurt. We hope hope hope for them so acutely, even when a part of us feels like we can’t, or shouldn’t.

There are very few situations in which this book would work. Few authors could craft a story that would make us understand incest, let alone support Lochan and Maya’s decisions the way we did while reading. And although we both love happily ever afters, the truth is that sometimes the perfect ending isn’t the characters dancing off together to the singing of birds and the rustling of fallen leaves. Sometimes, the only way a story can end is with heartbreak and triumph and hope and devastation and redemption and surrender. The world that Suzuma built is a real one, and a hard one, and one that neither of us wants to let go of quite yet.