We Are the Match
In Mary E. Roach’s smoldering novel We Are the Match, a modern retelling of the Trojan War, star-crossed lovers maneuver against a powerful crime family for revenge.
After losing her sisters on the island of Troy to bombs and fire, Paris seeks revenge against Zarek, the patriarch of the offending crime family. She arranges a meeting with his mysterious, beautiful daughter, Helen, at her engagement party. After Paris saves Helen from a bombing, they become embroiled in the investigation of this challenge against Zarek. As Paris fuels suspicions to ignite internal warfare, Helen uses Paris to plot escape from her family’s bloody past. As they are double- and triple-crossed, their mutual attraction intensifies.
The book teems with gripping subterfuge and duplicity that’s rendered in eloquent prose. Even with a former friend, Paris is mistrustful: “In this world, people listen. Words can be recorded and twisted. Words can kill.” The depicted cruelties are graphic and physical: Helen is haunted by her mother’s violent death; during an interrogation, Zarek cuts off Paris’s fingers for her disrespect. Resplendent and sensuous images also abound: Paris, after the engagement party, envisions Helen amid “silk that smells of whisky and vanilla. Glass skylights and rain. Poppies at the bedside.”
The characters, all somehow “complicit” in Zarek’s brutality, are fascinating in their moral ambiguity. Paris is ruthless and utilitarian, but her remembrance of Trojan sisterhood is humanizing and heartbreaking. Helen, too, is contradictory, with a shocking and scorching secret past that’s filled with threatening, uncontrollable detonations, learned alongside her master bomb-maker mother. Her relationship with Paris is fiery and propulsive; she wonders, “Can you like someone who has both saved your life and treated you like a plaything?”
A passionate dark romance, We Are the Match is about family, vengeance, love, and freedom.
Reviewed by
Isabella Zhou
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
