Review: The Unrequited by Saffron A. Kent

The Unrequited by Saffron A. Kent

Publication date: July 13th, 2017

Pages: 340

Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Synopsis:

Layla Robinson is not crazy. She is suffering from unrequited love. But it's time to move on. No more stalking, no more obsessive calling. What she needs is a distraction.

The blue-eyed guy she keeps seeing around campus could be a great one--only he is the new poetry professor--the married poetry professor.

Thomas Abrams is a stereotypical artist--rude, arrogant, and broody--but his glares and taunts don't scare Layla. She might be bad at poetry, but she is good at reading between the lines. Beneath his prickly facade, Thomas is lonely, and Layla wants to know why. Obsessively.

Sometimes you do get what you want. Sometimes you end up in the storage room of a bar with your professor and you kiss him. Sometimes he kisses you back like the world is ending and he will never get to kiss you again. He kisses you until you forget the years of unrequited love; you forget all the rules, and you dare to reach for something that is not yours.

Note: This is a standalone romance with dark themes such as cheating and stalking. It features an obsessive girl who stalks her professor and an over possessive poetry professor who falls for his forbidden student.

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Review:

Layla insists that she is not crazy even if everything she does is certifiable. She is impulsive and makes choices that she knows is wrong but she can't seem to stop herself. Like when she sees a man inhabiting the bench that she often frequents to sleep, not because she is homeless, but because it is just a place she feels connected to. When she sees him she can see the war that is waged on his face. The tired and furious expression becomes an obsession to her. She wants to unlock all his secrets and find out how his puzzle pieces match up with hers. But he is there and gone in a flash. However, when she keeps seeing him she chooses to follow him. She wants to know who he is and why he calls to a part of her that she can't seem to escape. Turns out he is the new poetry professor and while she never had any interest in poetry, she suddenly wants to understand why he is. Layla throws herself into a class she doesn't understand and tries to impress the professor. The more she interacts with him the more the two press into each other like heat seeking missiles. The problem is Layla is still in love with her best friend that she forced to sleep with her and then abandoned her. And her professor, Thomas, has a wife who doesn't seem to want him to even breathe in her direction. The loneliness and longing to feel something other than it sends the two of them on a crash course into bad choices and a relationship doomed to fail. Can two broken and unloved souls find solace even for a moment in each other?

I have never really read a book that like this. Most romance books tend to turn away from cheating because of how taboo it is. People don't want to read about a couple who are likely doomed to fail because they are in love with other people. Especially not when one is married, even to an emotionally distance wife. I thought I would hate that subject matter out of sheer principle. However, I saw how lonely and hurt Thomas and Layla were and wanted them to find some sort of happiness. Throughout the book I was dreading the ending. I just had a feeling that in the end Thomas's wife would turn things around and he'd be fully invested in her again. Even Layla seemed resigned to this face. She was willing to sacrifice her own happiness to give Thomas what he needed in that moment and didn't care how things turned out for her. 

Layla was so chaotically unhinged that I worried for Thomas sometimes. I feel like if she wasn't willing to let him go at any point, she would hunt him down and there would be nothing he could do about it. But even being as crazy as she claims she isn't, she was still a character I found endearing all the same. 

I think Saffron Kent wrote a darkly poetic work of fiction that I gobbled up in a single night. I was lost in the way Thomas and Layla worked through their feelings and everything that was intertwined.