Book Review: Losers Part I By Harley Laroux

Losers Part 1 By Harley Laroux


Losers Part 1 by Harley Laroux - Book 1 in the Losers Duet

Tropes: Why Choose Romance, Reverse Harem (1 FMC + 4 MMC), Bully Romance, Enemies to Lovers, Dark Romance, BDSM, Praise & Degradation, Bisexual MMCs, Polyamory, Touch Her and You Die, Found Family, Ex-Cheerleader Heroine

Summary:

Losers Part I is the first installment of Harley Laroux’s wildly popular Losers duet, a why-choose dark romance that flips the bully trope on its head. Following the events of The Dare, this book takes us deep into the dynamic between Jessica and the four men she once tormented in high school.

Jessica was prom queen and cheer captain, the school’s most savage queen bee. Manson, Jason, Lucas, and Vincent were the freaks, the weirdos, the losers she made it her mission to destroy. Now, with college behind them and a debt she can’t walk away from, Jessica is back in their orbit and exactly where she was always meant to be: at their mercy. The four of them are willing to share her as their plaything, and what was meant to be a contractual game very quickly becomes something far more dangerous, far more devastating, and far more honest than any of them expected.

This is BDSM, kink-positive, polyamorous romance at its most unflinching: graphic, intense, and deeply emotional. Jessica is forced to confront the version of herself she used to be, and the men she once cast as villains slowly become the safest people she has ever known. Harley Laroux delivers a heroine arc that is genuinely transformative, paired with the kind of devotion only a why-choose romance can give you.

 

BOOK REVIEW

Vengeful. Filthy. Five hundred pages of "I absolutely should not be rooting for this" and then rooting for it with my whole chest.

Here's what makes Losers hit different: the FMC was the bully. Not the bullied. Jess walked into this book as the villain of everyone's high school flashback, and Laroux never once lets her off the hook for it or you. There's no soft retcon, no "she was secretly nice the whole time." She did the things. She has to live in the wreckage of them. Watching her actually reckon with who she was, while the four people she hurt decide what they want to do about it, is the kind of morally messy setup I will never not be obsessed with.

And the men. Oh, the men. The genius of this book is that Manson, Jason, Lucas, and Vincent never blur into one interchangeable broody group of love interests. They're four entirely distinct people, four different flavours of want, four different ways of getting under Jess's skin and yours. Manson alone could carry a book. The fact that the multi-POV puts you inside all of it, every angle of the tension, every contradiction, is what makes the why-choose work so well. You're not picking. That's the point. You want her to have all of them.

Is it dark? Yes. BDSM, graphic violence, the full content note in the front matter for a reason, go in informed kind of dark. But what surprised me is how tender it is underneath. These men are vengeful and mean and a little terrifying, and also startlingly devoted, and the whiplash between those two things is the entire engine of the story. Cruel one second, achingly soft the next. Devastating. In the best way.

And the spice? Phenomenal. Laroux writes intimacy with total confidence, never gratuitous, always doing emotional work, always raising the stakes between these five people instead of just filling pages. The build is unbearable in the most delicious way.

If I have one complaint, it's that this is half a story and it knows it. The second you turn the final page you will be lunging for Part Two. Consider yourself warned.

“I think we’re all hypocrites, in one way or another. As we grow up and figure out who we are, sometimes our thoughts change before our behavior does. It’s not pretty, and it can be fucked up, but we’re not perfect.”

It’s dark, it’s filthy, it’s tender in the most surprising places, and it sets up Part II perfectly. Harley Laroux at her most ruthless and her most romantic.