Review: Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma
Sigh. It seems I’m always having to load my negative reviews with caveats these days. This one will be an especially strange one, one I never thought I’d utter: I, Phoebe North, have no intellectual problem with incest per se. My frustration with Tabitha Suzuma’s novel didn’t arise because I felt some instinctive revulsion at the pairing of the two central characters, a brother and a sister. In fact, in the past I’ve very much enjoyed other novels featuring incestuous relationships: Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex; Francesca Lia Block’s gorgeous, painfully pretty Wasteland; even, of course, Flowers in the Attic. Hell, my great-grandparents were first cousins. I’m not one to judge, and I’m definitely not squeamish. Well, at least not about the sex lives of consenting parties, no matter how taboo.
What I am squeamish about are highly unsympathetic protagonists, particularly when we’re clearly meant to sympathize with them. I’m squeamish about people with poor boundaries and jealous inclinations. I’m squeamish about pretension when it’s paired with misanthropy and a not-particularly incisive view of the world around you. I’m squeamish about being inserted into the head of a jerk with clunky justifications about his morally abhorrent actions, which I have every reason to believe we were supposed to buy. And above all, I’m squeamish about melodrama.
Forbidden was melodramatic. And I don’t mean the melodrama of a typical adolescent, but rather Lifetime-movie melodrama. Alcoholism and abandonment and abuse and medical maladies that go untreated (not to mention the incest). Alas, Maya, my love! And so on.
Now, that’s not to say that Forbidden was valueless. Even Lifetime movies are a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. In Forbidden, Suzuma creates a claustrophobic and richly detailed universe, described in a way I can only call “eminently readable” in clichéd reviewer parlance. It’s a thick book, but immersive, well-paced despite the long stretches between both action and sex scenes. And the sex scenes are particularly steamy, some of the hottest I’ve read in recent memory—far more graphic than what one usually finds in YA, complete with hardness, panting, knickers, wrists being held down, and orgasms that burn with the fury of a thousand suns. No joke—they’re described in roughly those terms.
Forbidden is the story of the Whitely family. Eldest brother Lochan has been holding things together (despite crippling social anxiety and the fact that he pretty much hates everyone he’s not related to) for six years now, since his father left and his mother became an alcoholic mess. He’s got a huge gaggle of siblings, all with very strange names: Tiffen, Willa, Kit. But it’s Maya, only thirteen months his junior, who he loves the best. Lochan decided at twelve that he’d never let his family be broken apart—probably because he hates everyone he’s not related to—and so he and Maya have been acting as a make-shift parents to the little kids while his mom goes out and boozes it up.
All of this—told in Maya and Lochan’s alternating perspectives—is meant to make us understand their Epic Love, how they can’t trust anyone who is not a Whitely, why they have to stay together at all costs, why, if anything, it’s the parents who have forced them into these roles who are evil. This background information is meant to make us understand how, damn it, they’re so self-sacrificing that they deserve love, too.
The first problem—really, the big problem, the flashing-lights-and-sirens problem—is Lochan. We spend half of the book looking at the world through his perspective. And it’s a perspective warped by an inflated sense of self-importance and a disdain for those around him, a perspective transmitted via overwrought, painfully melodramatic prose. The rain is described as looking like tears. Malaise dissipates and then stormily solidifies once again. Everything is very terrible and very tragic, except for sweet, perfect, beautiful, sexy Maya—until, of course, she goes on a date with another boy.
Suzama distinguishes between the POV characters by writing a bit less pretentiously from Maya’s perspective, and for the most part, it’s a believable shift. Maya herself, unkissed at sixteen, is so painfully naïve to be rendered an innocent, despite her own protestations to the contrary. She seems to genuinely believe that all this playing-house makes her and her brother as good as married. More, she truly believes that they’re fated to be together and have the best love ever and God, why don’t people see that and God, why life is so unfair?!
Of course, all of this is fairly typical first-love stuff. Maya is generally fairly typical. Unlike Lochan, she has friends and romantic prospects, isn’t afraid to speak in school. She’s normal, and I quite liked her, at first, but the way she worships curmudgeonly, misanthropic Lochan as the best, kindest, handsomest, most wonderful person she’s ever known did quite a bit to degrade her as a sympathetic character.
And this was in a large part because Lochan is a rubbish parent, and while it’s not exactly his fault that he’s been forced into a parental role, he digs in his heels in order to keep his fortress of solitude up around him, forging straight into disaster with disastrous consequences. The children go around teased and harassed by teachers because they’re dressed in clothing that’s filled with holes. Twice in the narrative, members of his family should be taken to the hospital, but aren’t, because Lochan believes this will attract the eye of social services. Until the illicit romance begins (at which point Maya and Lochan are all-too-eager to push the little birds from the nest), interest in friends seems to be viewed as an abhorrent threat. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Kit, their thirteen-year-old brother, who is treated like a petulant jerk, mostly because he sees straight through Lochan’s daddy-act, and calls him on it, too.
Nowhere is Lochan’s failure as a nascent adult more clear than in his attitude toward Maya. If the other GR reviews are to be believed, he’s a sensitive, sweetly-woobie-ish boy. I thought he was closer to a jealous creep. When Maya goes on a date with another boy, he stays up all night fuming and stewing. When she returns home, he jealously interrogates her (while sobbing. Because, you know, he’s sensitive) and the only way that Maya is able to prove that she didn’t actually sleep with this other boy is by kissing Lochan.
Their relationship then progresses in passionate fits-and-starts. One moment, the pair are frantically groping one another; the next, they’re bemoaning (through some excruciatingly talky narration) the fact that they’re siblings and, oh noes, can never be together. It’s very, very dramatic. I suspect the inflated self-importance, and the hot and heavy boner-grabbing and premature ejaculations will highly appeal to young teens. The title accurately plays up the appeal of this book—the taboo and the melodrama and all of that. But deep down, I couldn’t move past my suspicion that it was really just a hearty mix of tragedy and incest porn.
Or the fact that Lochan is really, really creepy. I mean, the first scene you could possibly consider a “sex scene” happens while Maya has a concussion. This, combined with his jealous nature, his propensity toward violence (he strangles one sibling, and dislocates the shoulder of another) and his selfish refusal to do the right thing right up to the conclusion of the novel deeply disturbed me. In the latter half of the book, we’re given dozens of pages of narration that justifies their relationship. It’s subtly compared to other relationships once seen as taboo (Maya bemoans that she’ll have to stay “closeted”) and the pair produces a host of arguments meant to provide intellectual justification for their actions.
But really, they’re just selfish, squandering money on gifts for one another while their siblings go around injured and in hole-ridden clothing; disdainfully viewing the other teen romances around them as shallow, superficial, and damaging; decrying the selfishness of their parents or siblings even as they’re busy screwing like bunnies. Overall, I had no problem with the incest. It’s the characters I’m hung up on.
(But at least they used condoms.)
Phoebe
Phoebe is a 20-something writer who lives in New York State with her husband and cat. She is a dork, not a geek or a nerd.
Her debut novel, Starglass, will be released from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers in Summer 2013.
6 comments
Ana from The Book Smugglers told me about your review since I just downloaded this book. To be honest, incest as a romantic trope in YA disturb me, but then again Andrews' Flowers in the Attic series in being sold in the YA section of book stores. And yes I read that series when I was a teen.
I'll most likely read Forbidden and wait to give my final opinion. Awesome review BTW!
Ooh, did you just get the new Galley Grab newsletter, too?
I wonder if my relative liberalism worked against my enjoyment of this book–I've thought through arguments for/against consensual incest before, and so the ones present here didn't exactly wow me. I was more focused on the specific situation between the characters, where THIS particular relationship seemed selfish and untenable.
It's a really readable book, and well-regarded enough to take a look anyway. Hope you enjoy it more than I did.
Yes I did! LOL.
I hear the sex scenes are graphic. But many have given Forbidden rave reviews. I think mainly because of the taboo subject matter and the tragic ending.
Interesting review! To be fair, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of incest. First cousins having a relationship – I have no problem with, provided that they act responsibly. It's more tricky with people from the same household (Westermarck effect and all that). In my mind, if two siblings are attracted to one another and wish to pursue a sexual relationship, then it might be an indicator that their family life was pretty messed up to begin with – as is the case with Forbidden. Hence, I don't think I would be able to buy such a relationship as an example of truest, purest and most glorious love. Oh – the characters might very well view it as such, and describe it such, but their assessment would still come across as distorted by the pathological situation they were forced to live in. The overall picture wouldn't be showing two star-crossed lovers who "finally find the love they deserve", but two incredibly miserable messed-up people who take comfort wherever they can.
Thanks for the comment, Morri. I stumbled thanks to the Westermarck effect, too (and here I was, thinking I was just being a nerd). I'm not sure your assessment of the main couple is far off–but I've been split on how intentional I feel that was on the part of the writer.
[...] by unsympathetic characters as long as I understand them. I suspect I struggled with Lochan from Forbidden because there are plenty of poor children of divorce who don’t resort to incest–not [...]