Reviews

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Saffron A. Kent’s The Hatesick Diaries ✍🏻

Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

Tropes: new adult romance; young adult romance; love triangle; forbidden romance; tortured hero; virgin heroine; soulmates

I’ve been sitting on my review for Saffron A. Kent’s The Hatesick Diaries. It’s hard to express to readers why they should read an author from a stylistic perspective. It’s simple to tell you that, if you love YA or new adult angsty romance that is $exually titillating and features a tortured hero with a sunshine, virgin heroine, you should read Kent’s book. But there is something incredibly interesting about Kent’s style…in all of her books. I hope that readers understand the sometimes sparse and staccato rhythm of her writing as her signature, the way that sets her apart from other authors in the genre. She also writes pain and angst onto her characters in ways that feel hyperbolized. Yet, even as they struggle through intense possessive feelings (on the part of her MMCs) and her FMCs find themselves indelibly attracted to the MMC in ways that can feel toxic and overwhelming, their struggles ingratiate themselves into an interest in the story. She crafts this phenomenon where you want to look away from the approaching trainwreck of her characters, but she then inserts a spicy moment between the two that binds them together more deeply. She spins this cycle over and over again that her characters find themselves so bound by their tempest and desire there is no way they canNOT be together. 

Over and over, Kent swings this pendulum, hypnotizing her readers into her story.
She does this in The Hatesick Diaries for Echo and Reign. As Echo and Reign mistake their attraction and love as hate for the other, Kent emphasizes how humans spin stories to ameliorate their hard feelings. In this story, Reign must treat Echo with hate and disdain because he loves her beyond a measure that he can allow himself given the trauma of his past which informs his sense of self. And Echo’s naivete leads her into a relationship that she misconstrues because she simply doesn’t know better. What happens is a dance of drama between the two, creating moments of forbidden, scintillating passion. This makes for the type of reading where you take breaks on TikTok to calm your anxiety over Reign and Echo’s journey. Thankfully, Kent ends in powerful, dreamy happy endings. This is definitely the case for this couple, so find peace in that as you read her book. But also consider the details and decisiveness of Kent’s writing. Ask yourself why she crafts stories with the style and elements that define her as an author. I think you’ll realize her intentionality as an author and fall in love with her even more. 

I have to say…I think Reign is my favorite St. Mary’s Rebels hero/MMC. I can’t help but love a tortured hero with a past rife with disappointment and pain. Like Echo, I strive to see him just as he is outside of the gossip of his community. And in the end, how can you not adore a bandit who is maddeningly, from his head to his toes, in love with his bubblegum? You can’t.

In love and romance,

Professor A