Review: From Lukov with Love

From Lukov with Love by Mariana Zapata
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my first Mariana Zapata, but I went into it with 100% knowledge of her shtick (sloooooooow burn, no sex til the literal last minute, etc). I'm not sure if that's what left me feeling completely underwhelmed by this.

The story was certainly good enough, the banter was great, but I didn't see any real reason for it to be even half as long as it wound up being. I do love a good slow burn, but for me, the real tension of that, despite the constant bickering between Jasmine and Ivan, didn't lend any real credence to their eventual coming together. You expect it to be like a literal dam breaking after five hundred pages and this was kind of like.......a minor but annoying drip from your kitchen faucet? I don't know. There was just no real payoff, and I am thinking that's because I was never fully invested in their relationship.

Ivan was sweet, and it was obvious early on that he wasn't who Jasmine thought he was, but then again, he wasn't really that bad to begin with? It was very much a high-school (or grade-school, even) tit-for-tat relationship between them, and that was a bit odd given that they are in their early thirties/late twenties, respectively. That's not to say that they're "too old" to act a certain way (you're never too old to act however you want, IMO), but it was just so petty (you're ugly, you're dumb, blah blah blah) that it never really felt like they actually hated each other, and certainly didn't hate each other enough to justify five hundred pages of back and forth for one page of mediocre sex. They'd already seen each other naked at that point, so outside of a few "oh fuck, ugh...." there was nothing to shake a vibrator at there. This scene was like a two-pump-chump in book form.

Eh....I guess I'm having a hard time putting my feelings into words on this because I don't really have any feelings on it to begin with. It was just so meh. Competently written, sure, in spite of all the typos and garbled speech, and some of the insults were truly choice, but all in all I found myself more bored than engrossed, and the only reason I read it so fast was so I could move on to something that gave me the tingles, a la "The Hating Game" or "The Folk of the Air" books.

So, first Mariana Zapata, and most likely last, because though I spend an inordinate amount of time torturing myself over nothing, even I'm not enough of a sadist to continually read books that are overly long and don't even give you anything to look forward to at the end.

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