📚The Worst Kind of Want Book Review

 

Author: Liska Jacobs
Rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️✨ (4.5/5)
Mood: Bitter Aperol Spritz on an empty stomach with a side of guilt and sunshine

💋 Initial Reaction

OK, listen.
I went into this book thinking, “Ah, a woman’s journey of grief and self-discovery in Rome. It’ll be artsy, broody, maybe a little sad girl aesthetic."
NOPE.
What I got instead was a scorching descent into the chaos of lust, repression, and self-destruction. And guess what? I loved it. I ate it up like bad vacation gelato that gives you food poisoning but also makes you feel alive.

This book is like sitting too close to a bonfire and yes it's dangerous, hot, but you know you're going to walk away smelling like smoke and bad decisions. Liska Jacobs doesn’t coddle you. She shoves you headfirst into the mess and says, “You’re welcome.”

🍋 The Plot:

Liliana is NOT your Pinterest-core, journaling, healing-by-the-sea protagonist.
She’s in her 40s, simmering with unspoken grief after the death of her sister, and simmering even more because she feels invisible, unwanted, and stuck in a loop of caretaking roles she never signed up for.

Her latest gig? Babysitting her teenage niece in Rome. Classic setup for reflection and spiritual growth, right? WRONG. Instead of enlightenment, Lil stumbles into a sun-drenched, wine-soaked crisis where she starts an affair with Donato, a teen boy (YES, A TEEN BOY) and unravels like it’s a competitive sport.

It’s reckless. It’s uncomfortable. It’s like watching a car accident in real time while you sip Prosecco.
And that’s the point.

❤️ What had me screaming “YES, QUEEN, BURN IT ALL DOWN”

• Liliana is a goddamn disaster in the best way.
  She’s not here to be your feminist empowerment hero. She’s bitter, grieving, horny, and not trying to fix herself.And I lived for that. She’s the kind of woman we rarely get in fiction—flawed, self-destructive, selfish, unapologetically spiraling. I rooted for her like I root for the worst characters on reality TV.

• Jacobs’ writing is pure poetry dipped in venom.
  Every sentence feels like it’s pressing on an old bruise. It’s lush, decadent, suffocating. She captures that sticky, oppressive heat of Rome in summer, where everything feels swollen with lust and decay.

• Italy is more than a setting, it’s a mood. (Would love to visit some day)
  You can feel the sweat sliding down your back as Lil wanders through ancient ruins and narrow streets, drowning in equal parts nostalgia and desire. The food, the history, the men—it’s all there to tempt, suffocate, and smother her.

• The unapologetic exploration of female desire and decay.
  This book looks straight into the ugly, feral side of desire—the kind that’s wrapped in shame and longing and loneliness. Lil wants to be seen, touched, consumed. And she’s willing to cross every line to feel alive again.

👠 What made me want to slap Lil with her sunhat

• That goddamn ENDING.
  Oh, you thought you were gonna get closure? A life lesson? A healing arc? HA. No, babes. Jacobs ends it the way life does—mid-sentence, mid-fall, mid-crisis. Some readers will call it brave. I called it evil genius. But did I want to scream into a pasta bowl? Absolutely.

• Lil’s self-pity can feel like quicksand.
  At some point, I did wish she would at least try to pull herself out of her pity spiral. But nah. She goes deeper. And deeper. It’s realistic—but exhausting. Like, girl, drink some water.

• The whole teenage boy thing... yeah, it’s meant to make you uncomfortable.
  And it does. Lil knows it's wrong. The reader knows it’s wrong. That’s the point. But still... it might be a line too far for some folks. Personally? I was clutching my pearls and flipping pages with unholy fascination.

💔 The Feels Meter: A Slow Burn Breakdown

This book gave me the ache in the pit of my stomach I didn’t know I was craving.
It’s about that unbearable kind of want—the kind that eats you alive, that rots you from the inside out, that makes you burn your own house down for a taste of something forbidden.
It’s about the suffocating weight of womanhood, grief, and aging in a world that tells you you’re expired after 35.
It’s not hopeful. It’s not redemptive.
But it’s honest. And in its honesty, it is beautiful.

Final Verdict?

4.5 out of 5 stars.
Would I recommend?
Only to the girlies (and gays and theys) who like their literary fiction with a side of existential thirst, moral ambiguity, and Italian despair.
If you like clean character arcs and tidy endings, RUN.
If you want a book that ruins your life for 300 pages and leaves you staring at the ceiling questioning your choices? This one’s for you.

Would you ALSO like a fake chaotic Yelp review of Rome written by Lil herself?
If yes, say “YES, YELP.”
Because I can.
And it would be messy.