Posted on Plot Twisted | By CJ & LD
The enemies-to-lovers trope has one job: make the tension feel real, make the shift feel earned, and do not let us watch the heroine get emotionally battered for 400 pages and then call it a slow burn.
We read two of them. One delivered. One absolutely did not. Here’s the full breakdown on both — with all the spoilers, all the opinions, and zero apologies.
⚠️ Full spoilers throughout. Both books. You’ve been warned.
HATE ME LIKE YOU MEAN IT — Kyra Parsi ★★★★½
📖 Reviewed by CJ | Rating: 4.5/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Ten years of real tension. A frame job. A best friend who was never a friend at all. This is what enemies to lovers is supposed to feel like.
What Actually Happens
Alice and Dominic grew up together. Her family had money. His mom Rosie was their cleaner. They were practically raised as extended family with rivalry and teasing and tension and underneath all of it, something that looked a lot like love. They were teenagers, so they didn’t have language for it yet, but by the end of high school they both knew how they felt.
Then it all fell apart.
Right around graduation, stolen jewelry turned up in Rosie’s car and the Polaroid evidence looked damning. Rosie never denied it (for reasons nobody understood at the time) and Alice’s family let her go. Dominic and his mom disappeared from their lives entirely. The prom invitation Dominic had sent Alice? Alice thought it was a prank. Because Alice’s best friend Rachel had been quietly, methodically manufacturing misunderstandings between them, driving wedges and making sure they never quite found their way to each other.
Ten years later Dominic has made himself into one of the most successful men in the country and spends a significant portion of that influence lately making sure Alice can’t get a job. In every job application, every interview, he’s quietly been making sure she’s blacklisted. It’s petty and ruthless and extremely on brand for a man who has been furious and inconveniently in love with the same woman his entire adult life.
Alice, to her credit, is not having it.
She goads him into an arrangement: thirty days doing the cleaning duties his mother once handled at his home, and if she sticks it out, he stops blocking her career and leaves her alone. The premise sounds unhinged, and it is. I loved it. The banter between these two is genuinely, intelligently sharp. They know exactly how to dig at each other. They’ve had years of practice, and it’s completely entertaining
Meanwhile, Rosie is in twenty-four-hour care with Alzheimer’s, she’s comfortable and well-looked-after because Dominic can afford the best of everything for her now. He visits as often as he can, and eventually takes Alice to see her. Rosie talks warmly about her son and about Alice, the daughter of her heart if not of her blood, without fully understanding how tangled everything has become between them. It’s one of the most toughest threads in the book because Alice’s family can never fully make things right with her. That window is gone. It sits in the background of every scene between them as a truth that neither can say out loud.
The truth about Rachel comes out when Dominic goes through old videos and notices something: the jewelry in the Polaroid doesn’t match Alice’s hands. Not her rings, not her knuckles, not her jewelry at all. He starts working backwards – who had access, who was there, who had reason – and it has to be Rachel. Jealous, calculating Rachel who spent years making sure Alice and Dominic never found each other, and then framed an innocent woman to guarantee it.
Alice’s grandfather Gampy had been trying to reach Dominic for a decade, wanting to make things right, and finding him standing in Alice’s apartment after all this time makes him equal parts shocked and a little bit scary-mad. Every letter, every call, every email has been denied. Turns out Gampy is legitimately intimidating when he’s had enough, and it’s one of the funniest and most satisfying moments in the book.
When Alice finds out about Rachel, that friendship is over. She goes to confront her directly but no apology could undo what she did, and no explanation makes it okay. It was brave, and that conversation needed to happen so it was nice for her to get that closure.
And then, after ten years and who knows how many days of living inside each other’s orbit again, they both put their weapons down and say what has always been true underneath all of it. That they’ve always cared. That nothing that happened between them or around them or because of someone else ever actually touched what was underneath.
The banter: The best enemies banter CJ has read. It’s witty, cutting, intelligent, and genuinely funny without tipping over into mean-spirited. They are so evenly matched and so good at getting under each other’s skin. This exchange is the whole book in four lines:
“Mom seems to think I have a crush on the boss’s daughter.”
“Do you?” I teased.
“No. She’s a mouthy spoiled brat who derives sadistic pleasure from causing me pain.”
I hummed, “she sounds really pretty.”
The verdict: Loved it. It’s not one dramatic confession scene; it’s a series of small realizations. Two people who have been circling each other for most of their lives, finally retracting the claws and admitting the truth. Given everything Dominic built himself into, everything Alice fought to prove about herself, and everything Rosie represents to both of them, there was never any keeping these two apart. CJ has reread this twice and it’s on the permanent rereads shelf.
Content notes: Alzheimer’s/memory loss, parental illness, themes of betrayal by a close friend.
→ Spoiler-free version at Plot Approved
THE WAY I HATE HIM — Meghan Quinn ★☆☆☆☆
🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 1/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | DNF at 87%
It started cute. Then it became five days of my life I want back.
What Actually Happens
Hattie has just failed her midterms after losing her sister Cassidy to breast cancer. Then her boyfriend Matt breaks up with her on the same day, citing without apparent shame that she hasn’t been “entertaining enough” lately. As she’s packing up her things, she finds a box that isn’t hers — turns out it’s stolen property belonging to Matt’s boss, including a Grammy. She grabs it and goes to return it herself, mostly hoping to get Matt fired in the process.
That boss is Hayes — famous musician, feuding with Hattie’s older brother Ryland for reasons nobody has fully explained — and when he catches Hattie dropping off a box of his stolen belongings, he doesn’t say thank you. He threatens to have her charged with the theft instead. His counter-offer: she takes the job Matt was supposed to do — reading letters, organizing, setting up his computer. She takes it because what else is she supposed to do.
Cassidy left behind a young daughter named Mac, who is being raised by Ryland. Mac has a stuffed animal named Chewy Charles who she takes extremely seriously. She informs Hattie that Chewy Charles doesn’t like her. At one point during what should be a perfectly normal play session, Mac announces that Chewy Charles is “drinking the blood… muahahahaha.” Just casually. As children do.
Mac and Chewy Charles are the best part of this book. They are not the main event of this book, which is a genuine loss.
The feud: Hayes, Ryland, and Abel were once three close friends. Abel has stayed neutral throughout — dinner with Hayes, still considered Ryland’s best friend. The feud is between the other two and has been burning for over ten years.
The cause: Ryland’s girlfriend turned up pregnant and told him it was Hayes’. It wasn’t. She was furious at Hayes because he’d turned her down — wouldn’t sleep with her — and blaming him was her retaliation. She’d actually slept with someone else, and that guy later admitted it to Abel. Hayes knew the truth the whole time and told Abel to keep quiet about it, reasoning that it wasn’t Ryland’s business since Ryland hadn’t believed him anyway.
What actually broke Hayes wasn’t the accusation. It was that Ryland believed it immediately. Didn’t come to him, didn’t question it, just took the girlfriend’s word as gospel. And Hayes decided: fine. If everyone’s going to assume the worst about me anyway, I might as well lean into it.
Mid-argument, Abel finally says he’s not staying quiet anymore. Confirms the truth. By the time LD tapped out at 87%, Ryland and Hayes were in the same room at a community gathering without it becoming a problem. Not reconciled. Just occupying the same space. It’s a start, I guess.
Where it went wrong: Hayes is the problem. Not in the enemies-to-lovers way, not in the “he’s difficult but you can see why” way. In the actual, genuine “this man is systematically eroding her confidence and it is not romantic” way.
He tells Hattie he isn’t attracted to her. Then nearly gets her off and walks away like nothing happened. He holds her hand and talks to her for a two-hour drive, then tells her nothing is happening between them the moment they arrive. He makes her share a bed with him — she tries the couch, the couch is terrible — and they make a bet: first one to moan loses. Hayes wins. And then acts completely casual while she’s left feeling terrible about herself.
He dedicates a song to her at a show without using her name. He looks her directly in the eyes while playing her favourite song. And then goes right back to hot and cold until she gets so confused she gets trash drunk trying to process it.
This is not tension. This is negging. The entire push-pull cycle — give her something, walk away, make her feel bad about it, flirt with someone else in front of her, circle back — is a textbook confidence erosion pattern, and watching Hattie keep coming back for more was genuinely painful.
To be fair: Hattie wasn’t without fault. There were points she blamed Hayes for things that weren’t his fault and got exhausting in her own right. By the midpoint LD was frustrated with both of them, which is not where you want to be in a romance.
The back half: Around chapter 16, the book reaches what feels like a natural conclusion — the fake breakup, the finally-together moment. Six hours of audio left.
Hayes’s redemption arc, when it arrives, is: someone tells him to fix the room he and Ryland trashed during their fight, and he does it. That’s it. He didn’t arrive at growth on his own. He was given an instruction. He followed it. He still gets full credit for it.
There’s also a BDSM turn that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t feel consistent with anything that’s been established. In the context of a man who has spent this entire book systematically chipping away at her confidence, it landed very differently for LD than it might have otherwise.
He tells her he loves her on her birthday. They have been actually together for approximately four seconds.
LD tapped out at 87%. Does not regret it. Does regret not doing it sooner.
The verdict: Hayes spent most of this book eroding Hattie’s self-esteem and then got a redemption arc because someone told him to fix a room. That is not character growth, that is following instructions. Mac and Chewy Charles deserved a better book built around them. The premise was there. The execution was not.
→ Spoiler-free version at Plot Approved
The Takeaway
Enemies to lovers lives and dies on one thing: does the hate have roots? And does the shift feel earned by both of them, or just received by her while he finally decides to show up?
Hate Me Like You Mean It has roots — ten years of them, a real betrayal, two people who’ve been in love their whole lives and couldn’t get there because someone kept making sure they didn’t. When they finally put the armor down, it means something.
The Way I Hate Him has a great setup and an exhausting execution. The feud backstory is interesting. The side characters (Mac! Chewy Charles!) are genuinely great. But the hero spent 80% of the book making the heroine feel terrible about herself and got handed growth for following instructions, and that’s not a romance — that’s a lesson in why you should have quit sooner.
If you love the trope: Hate Me Like You Mean It. If you want to know exactly how wrong it can go: you’ve now been briefed.
Want more enemies to lovers? Browse all romance reviews at Plot Twisted →
Spoiler-free versions at Plot Approved →