Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - Throttled

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

Throttled by Lauren Asher

111 reviews

bsikora002's review against another edition

emotional funny informative lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

This read like a fanfic of the actual F1 circuit, before Danny left. Noah reminded me of a mixture of Max and Charles, with the family background and the color of the team.

The racing content itself was okay, but the pacing of everything felt so fast, especially in regard to Maya's adventures in the cities. They would be out exploring and then within the next few sentences, they would be back at the hotel getting ready. And the amount of time the characters spent checking each other out, I swear to god 😭

Content Warnings

deeb_reads's review against another edition

Go to review page

lighthearted slow-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

I (a Formula One fan) finally caved and read a sports romance, one that is apparently Tiktok- famous. If you just want an audiobook to consume while simultaneously cooking and scrolling through your feed, you could do far worse, but IMO it delivers as neither a F1 book or a romance. The writing is unsubtle and cringy, the characters feel like collections of tropes, the romance is underbaked, and worse (to me), it captures little of the real drama of F1 off and on track.

Maya is a 23 year old recent college graduate who has always felt overshadowed by her brother Santi, a rising star driver in Formula One. Since she doesn’t have a job lined up, Santi asks her to accompany him around the world as he competes in a year’s worth of races, and she plans to make travel vlogs during the season. Santi has just been signed for the prestigious Bandini team. Unfortunately, he will be paired as teammates with Noah, a 30 year old American driver who has won multiple championships and has resented Santi since the two crashed years ago in an accident that cost Noah a world title. Despite the bad blood between Santi and Noah, Maya and Noah immediately start objectifying each other– I mean, they fall in love! They basically ogle each other for 300 pages, resist getting together because of Noah’s emotionally unavailable fuckboy tendencies, and then insist that they can’t go public with their relationship because of the “rivalry” between Noah and Santi. (Which, at this point, has cooled to the status of functional coworkers.) Basically, exactly what you would expect, in far too many words.

Story wise, the pacing of this book drove (haha!) me bonkers. The first few chapters is setup– Santi and Noah are rivals; Noah and Maya are obsessed with each other but can’t get together because of various reasons. After that, very little actually happens. Noah and Santi race with the other 2 driver characters who have names, Maya films travel vlogs or driver interviews, Noah and Maya think about how much they’d like to have sex, Noah annoys Maya and Maya tries not to let on how much she finds the whole thing inexplicably hot. It gets old, very fast.

Despite the book’s length, I felt like the romance plot didn’t really develop in a compelling way. Maya and Noah’s “relationship” goes from zero to sixty faster than an F1 car with some classic “instalust.” Upon meeting, they both think at extreme length about how sexy they find the other. These are just excerpts of longer chunks of text:

“Noah’s lean kind of muscular is ideal for racing. Shit, the kind of muscular perfect for fucking against a door, in a shower, or on a counter. Vivid images fly through my head of Noah in compromising positions” (30)
“Her bone structure adds to her allure, along with full red-painted lips, long lashes, and dark hair that perfectly frames her tan face. With arresting brown eyes and a pout that I’m tempted to kiss away, she is gorgeous. My head takes off. I imagine her red lips wrapped around my cock as she sucks me off, her lipstick marking me while my hands tug on her hair.” (39)

Not to mention Noah gets half-hard in his pants basically every time he sees Maya and later admits to jacking off in the bathroom a couple times after seeing her around the team garage. The author’s attempts to build physical chemistry consist mainly of the cringy internal monologues, the characters getting absurdly turned on during minor interactions, and their skin “tingling” every time they touch to the point I worried they had some kind of nerve problem. I am okay with characters finding each other hot from the outset, but I need them to also have some kind of interesting dynamic. These characters just kind of run around in circles as Noah annoys Maya and Maya inexplicably finds it hot.

While there are attempts to give their relationship some emotional depth, I didn’t think they were pulled off well. Noah does go to therapy and tries to improve as a person, but we don’t see his character changing much beyond his willingness to enter an exclusive relationship with Maya. Noah and Maya also consistently have sex instead of talking out or trying to fix emotional problems, which undermines the attempts to show that their relationship is meaningful outside of sexual attraction.

I think that the romance is also undermined by how flat Noah and Maya are as characters. Since Maya and Noah are both kind of stock characters (especially Maya, who very much gives self-insert Y/N), it’s hard for the book to convince us that they have a deep emotional connection beyond physical attraction. You can’t like someone for their personality if they don’t have much personality.

"‘I’m probably going to marry her one day. I think she’s the one.’ [...]
Maya breathes new life into me, not wanting to piece me together but accepting all my jagged parts. Waking up to her makes my mornings, not because of her phenomenal blow jobs but for the special smile she gives me when I hit her snooze button five times. I love the way she lies in bed reading books in the middle of the day, unbothered and shooing me away when she hits a good part. She brushes off my gruff attitude with a smile and a kiss.” (292)

He doesn’t just like Maya for her body, but that… she is. Nice? And reads books? And likes to sleep?

I also think the romance (and the book as a whole) is really weakened by the writing style.

“How can he be so hot yet cute at the same time? Troubling.” (149)
“I’m into Maya. Like really into her.” (161)
“It’s hot, he’s hot, the whole situation is fucking hot” (256)

The writing is repetitive and pretty simplistic, making the relationship feel shallow and generally ruining any romantic or sexy vibes. It doesn’t get any better in the sex scenes.

“I bask in the afterglow of the best sex of my life.
‘Fuck, Maya, that was the best sex I’ve ever had.’” (263)

I get that this is the author’s debut novel and was probably published by a small press, but. Someone should have gotten her an editor or something.

The end to the romance plot is formulaic (formula-ic haha), which I don’t inherently mind! But it feels very rushed. The characters have been dating for less than a year and are already declaring their everlasting love (loudly and publicly, over team radio to the whole public, with sexual details). Ew.

In general, the book’s “tell not show” method of writing comes across as juvenile and cringy, especially when it comes to handling more serious themes like the romance plot or Noah’s relationship with his abusive father. This writing style also harms the pacing, causing more drag than a rear wing (haha!) because it spells out everything you need to know, multiple times, as obviously as possible. Instead of letting readers infer things based on the characters’ on-page actions, everything is just Said to you. Here’s a line from one of the early chapters:

“The uncertainty of never living up to anything he does intimidates me. His success makes me happy– don’t get me wrong– but I’m nervous about not accomplishing anything close to his greatness.”

These two sentences already repeat each other, and they merely rehash sentiments that Maya has already shared in earlier scenes. The author also misses moments to show details more naturally through on-page action. Maybe at Maya’s graduation, Santi is recognized by fans who mob him for pictures, and he is torn between being polite to them and not taking attention from Maya. (Honestly, it’s unrealistic that the F1 driver characters walk around in public without getting mobbed by fans and paparazzi.) This scene would establish that Santi is a good brother and a nice person, but that through no fault of his own, his fame and career can easily overshadow Maya.

In other places, the narration chooses to rush through or leave out actually interesting scenes. For example, Noah and Santi argue publicly about a racing incident, but their apology scene is completely off page. The on-page racing action lacks sensory detail or much real attention, except a couple times when drivers crash. Noah is a POV character, and presumably plenty of this book’s readers are F1 fans, so this choice baffles me.

The book’s writing of emotions suffers especially from the tell-not-show style. Characters spell out explicitly how they feel instead of letting readers read between the lines, which reads as simplistic and flat. The author also often writes emotions with a very awkward formula, “[emotion] [verb]s through me [because of reason].” Here are some quick examples:

“Pride surges through me at my foresight to plan.” (26)
“Guilt rushes through me because I don’t want to be attracted to Noah.” (148)
“Guilt runs through me at us talking about Santi this way because I love my brother.” (197)

This sentence structure is awkward and unsubtle and appears TWENTY FOUR TIMES in the book.

The emotional scenes are written to sound overwrought and melodramatic, meaning I can’t actually take them seriously. A big sideplot is Noah’s relationship with his abusive father, but his father is written as so over the top awful to the point of absurdity.

“His eyebrows raise, he rubs his chin, and his eyes have an evil spark. A montage of every villain from every movie.” (274)
“Not a single mark was left on my skin except for the mangled remains of my heart, a mangled organ ruined by the man in front of me.” (134)

In terms of characters, our main cast seems like little more than a bunch of cobbled-together cliches. Maya doesn’t have many traits besides being clumsy and awkward in a “quirky” way, which is the generic female romance lead. She’s given an opportunity to show off her skills and personality with her vlog channel, but we don’t see her do anything intentional with it that reveals who she is as a character. It just seems like ideas for videos and her success as a content creator just… happen to her.

Meanwhile, the book constantly reminds us how much of a “bad boy” Noah is to the point where it feels annoying and cringy.

“God plays cruel jokes on me. Just as I promise to be good, he wants me to fall right into the arms of the devil.” (31)

Look, I like well-written and compelling “bad boy” characters. I love Guys and Dolls, which is a classic annoyances to lovers, bad boy and uptight girl pairing. But to be compelling, bad boy characters need to be charming and have some other kind of allure, whereas Noah has all the charm and charisma of a horny middle schooler. The book isn’t even a nice competent entry in the “rivals to lovers” or category because Noah and Santi are the rivals (and would be a much more interesting couple, if they remembered their rivalry beyond the first 100 pages). Noah feels very immature and irresponsible, making it hard for me to believe that he’s a professional athlete or even a thirty year old man. He drinks and parties during the racing season, lets his crazy hookups get splashed all over the tabloids, and doesn’t seem to have any flirting strategies beyond acting sleazy and constantly bothering the object of his affection.

Liam and Jax, the only other named drivers, are basically just carbon copies of Noah– attractive but dickish playboy characters who seem more like frat boys than pro athletes who have at least some life responsibilities. Similarly, Maya’s friend Sophie is also a clumsy, petite young woman who is constantly cracking cringy jokes. (This is because Liam, Jax, and Sophie are all protagonists in the other romance novels in the series, so they have to have similar personalities to fit the established formula. Formula! Haha!) Santi is the only somewhat sympathetic character to me because he thinks Noah is an ass, but I also found him annoying in parts because he acts very possessive towards Maya in a way that felt kind of misogynistic.

General plot twists and development don’t seem to occur in a logical fashion, either feeling dragged out for no in-universe reason or dropped on us with no build. The actual F1 story takes a backseat to the romance– at no point does the championship actually seem all that exciting or high-stakes, and race points and wins barely impact the main story. The romance affects the racing storyline, but not the other way around. After maybe two big arguments in the first third of the book, Santi and Noah seemingly stop being mad and barely even act like they’re competing against each other. For the rest of the book, Santi seems to dislike Noah less because of their alleged professional rivalry and more because he sees Noah constantly ogling his sister, which, to be fair, Noah is totally doing. Dropping the rivalry plot also undermines the romance story, since we’re supposed to believe that one of the main reasons Noah and Maya can’t get together, or can’t share their relationship publicly, is because Santi and Noah dislike each other. Without the rivalry plot feeling relevant, their decision to keep their relationship a secret for Santi just feels like a contrived setup to create drama later.

Similarly, the side plot about Noah’s relationship with his abusive father does not make sense. Noah has little reason to still maintain relationships with his parents: from the prologue on he recognizes that they are bad people, and he is a successful thirty year old who does not financially rely on them. His eventual choice to cut off his parents could have worked if Noah initially normalizes his parents’ toxic behavior, but he grows to realize through therapy and his relationship with Maya that he is a victim of abuse. However, since he consistently recognizes his parents are in the wrong, it seems like there is no logical in universe explanation for his behavior.

(The way Noah eventually cuts off his dad also isn’t built up to at ALL and feels contradictory to other passages.

He reveals to his dad that he’s bought out his dad’s share in the team through a huge amount of networking at sponsor events. Then, in the very next chapter, he complains about sponsorships and claims he has “no interest in kissing ass,” without mentioning his herculean sponsorship pull at all. We also never see him earlier in the book doing anything at sponsor events but grinding on Maya. It just seems super random and like the author retconned this twist in without integrating it into the rest of the story.)

Regarding the F1 setting or general world, I was mad mad! In general, the setting doesn’t really inform the plot. This would be okay if the book was just going for silliness and vibes, but the author seems to be attempting genuine seriousness for most of the book. The romance plot often undermines the sports setting rather than complementing it. You would not see drivers grinding on women (especially a teammate’s sister) at a sponsor gala surrounded by their coworkers and financial backers, getting so drunk after being rejected that they miss all three free practice sessions (which could not happen anyway given that FPs are split between two days), or intentionally losing a race because of a crush– all things that happen in the book.

If you wanted to write a more serious novel about an F1 driver romance, there are plenty of realistic ways to connect the setting and the romance plot. Drivers are under intense public scrutiny, and this would certainly impact any romantic relationships they have. (In real life, F1 drivers such as Lando Norris have spoken up about relentless online harassment towards themselves and their partners.) Additionally, a time-consuming, globe-trotting career inherently presents obstacles to a serious relationship. I also would have loved to see more impact of the racing world on the relationship given how all-consuming a driver’s career is, ex. Noah stressing about a poor qualifying and gets into a fight with Maya because of it, or Maya feeling guilty about getting close to Noah because Santi is being dragged online by Noah’s fans. These could have all been added to give the story some more realism and depth as an F1 story, not just a story taking place in front of an F1 backdrop.

While some of the broad strokes and smaller details are somewhat accurate, some details are just obviously wrong. The book refers to qualifying as “qualifiers,” says that F1 cars are made of metal instead of carbon fiber, has the team principal relaying details to the drivers over the radio instead of their race engineers, etc. It’s totally fine if the book doesn’t want to get deep into the weeds, but basic facts shouldn’t just be straight up wrong. Details about the characters also seem low effort. Despite being Spanish, Maya thinks in feet and miles per hour, and she and Santi talk in English even when alone. (Noah eavesdrops on their private conversations, which he obviously couldn’t do if they were speaking Spanish.) There are also only four named drivers (Noah, Santi, Jax, and Liam), and it’s painfully awkward when a driver who isn’t them does something noteworthy because the book just refuses to give them a name. This occurs even when Noah is narrating, and presumably he would know the names of his fellow drivers when there are only twenty of them. It just generally feels low effort and poorly researched, like the author wanted the vibes of an F1 setting or a European main character but did not want to do much work to make the world feel realistic or fleshed out.

I don’t know if I expected better, but ultimately, Throttled is a letdown for me as both an F1 fan and a lover of enemies/ annoyances to lovers plots. It is written clumsily, the romance and characters feel flat, and the F1 setting is only partially realized and often works against the romance instead of with it. One day we F1 fans will get what the hockey girlies have, but that day is sadly not today.

Content Warnings

adiloretto's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

El concepto de cierre es algo extraño. Todo el mundo habla de lo catártico que es, pero nadie dice nada del dolor que sientes justo antes, del valor que se necesita para aceptar algo tan difícil, de cómo te destroza saber que tienes que pasar página, no porque quieras, sino porque no te queda otra.

Content Warnings

mrslettenmaier's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

3.5/5

Content Warnings

melllllting's review

Go to review page

medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This book started out slow but really picked up in the second half. The story is cliche but overall enjoyable. My biggest criticism is that the author doesn’t allow an opportunity to learn about the characters gradually. She tells you everything about them up front. It is also interesting to see the parallels to F1 in real life. The redeeming quality of this book? Noah Slade. Sexy in every way. The spicy scenes were SPICY 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Not sure if I will continue reading more of this series but if you see it happening just look away

Content Warnings

shb26's review against another edition

Go to review page

lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

mels_reading_log's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional funny hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is my first racing romance and ai really enjoyed it! Between all the female fans throwing themselves at the racers and the danger of the sport, it is hard to imagine one of the top playboys will want to settle down. Noah meets his rival’s sister and it’s all over for him. I just love the found family and support they give each other in the end.

Content Warnings

rosie_valadez's review against another edition

Go to review page

2.0

Content Warnings

sar_lion's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous emotional hopeful tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Wow, surprisingly good. Like the ending was so cute. Although there was some possesiveness that I did not enjoy from the MMC. There was a lot of the next couple in this series in this book too, not sure how I feel about that. I liked that the races were described in detail.

Content Warnings

laurahollis's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous

4.0

Content Warnings

More...