Hate Mail by Donna Marchetti: Book Review

Pub Date	March 14, 2024
Publisher	One More Chapter
Page Count	355 pages
Genre	Romance, Contemporary, Adult
Goodreads Star Rating	3.89
My star rating	1.5

Hate Mail Book Summary

Hate Mail by Donna Marchetti is a contemporary romance novel about Naomi, whose penpal starts writing to her after two years of silence, and she decides to track him down. At the same time, she starts dating her neighbor Jake, who is charming and lovely — but she still has unresolved feelings about Luca, the penpal.

Hate Mail Book Review

When you see a book that:

Costs only $1.19 in your Kindle store
Has a very cute cover
Has a premise that involves penpals and a bunch of letters
Is meant to be enemies to lovers (ish)

You buy the book, right? Right? And then you enjoy it, kick your feet, giggle and swoon. That’s how it’s meant to be.

Unfortunately, that was not the case with this book.

Hate Mail was such a uniquely bad experience that I honestly don’t know who would enjoy it. Usually, even when I hate a book, I can imagine there’s someone who’d like it. In fact, I can even understand why people would like it. There’s usually something that I can see appealing to people, even if I’m not convinced.

For this one, I can’t do that.

Even my mom, who reads rom-coms almost exclusively and loves them indiscriminately, would not like this book. I wouldn’t even recommend it to her.

So, what’s so wrong with Hate Mail?

If you ask me, everything. Other than the premise, that is.

It needed so much more work, time, and a good team of editors. While it might not be bad on a sentence basis — if a little stiff and robotic, void of emotion — I can’t say I haven’t read the same style before. But overall, it lacked charm, humor, romance, soul.

To begin with, the plot was entirely predictable. And you would say “well, it’s a rom-com, of course it’s predictable” — and I’d agree, most rom-coms are. But this one is somehow worse than most.

Our heroine, Naomi, starts receiving letters from her childhood penpal again. They’ve been writing to each other for years until two years before the beginning of the book, when their letters stopped. She’s really excited to have her penpal back, but there’s no return address and she can’t write to him.

Obviously, she has some feelings about Luca the penpal, so she decides to find him.

And then we meet Jake the neighbor. He’s handsome, swoony and charming. And it’s immediately obvious to you, the reader, that Jake is actually Luca. Even if you’ve never read a rom-com before, this is pretty clear.

However, the heroine doesn’t connect the dots. She goes on merrily oblivious until the end of the book when he has to spell it out to her. The dude is not even trying to conceal it.

And do you want to know why this misunderstanding happens?

Because she never asks his name. She just assumes his name is Jake. And apparently, throughout their entire, weeks-long relationship, she never calls him by his name or uses it in any other way.

If she only asked, there would be no book. And wouldn’t that be something?

Her excuse is that she’s bad with names. But how bad with names do you have to be to not know your boyfriend’s name?

I’m not saying that Luca is innocent in this. He does his fair share to mislead her, and even sleeps with her before she knows his true identity, which should be a crime. But somehow, I can’t blame him for Naomi’s stupidity.

The other problem is that you can’t really talk about these characters as if they’re real people. They feel very generic, very cardboard. Naomi is a girl, she’s good-looking, has red hair, and a vague interest in meteorology. Luca is a boy, has dark hair, blue eyes, is very good looking and likes animals.

That’s pretty much what you know about them. I can’t tell you anything about their flaws, good sides, quirks or fears. Because there are none. They’re two hot people that the author created simply to make them smooch like Barbie and Ken.

And if you think that at least the spice is good, that at least you can enjoy that, I have to break your heart. The spice is awful. Well, if you can call it that. There are a few “insert A into B” scenes, but that’s pretty much it. None of it was sexy in any way. Not even the kissing. The first kiss was so underwhelming that I had to go back and re-read to make sure it really happened.

On that note, nothing about Hate Mail was swoony. Not the banter, or the romance, nor any of the confessions. It was all just a flat line.

I don’t want to be mean because I did conclude that this author is a real person, but this book feels as if someone fed a few popular rom-coms and a premise to AI and asked it to write. It’s just so generic and soulless that I don’t have any other explanation.

There are so many unnecessary conversations and parts. For example, in the very first chapter, Naomi and her friend talk about Naomi not using a letter opener for half a page. And you would think, wouldn’t you, that this will somehow be important later. But it doesn’t, it’s never mentioned again.

Anyway, back to the… book?

After receiving that first letter from Luca, Naomi decides to investigate him. She spends an inordinate amount of money on plane tickets and people finding software. She talks to people from Luca’s past that she has no business talking to. It’s stalking, plain and simple.

All of this is spurred on by her friend, Anne. And Anne, I have to say, is even worse than our main characters. She is literally not even a cardboard cutout — she’s a toilet paper cutout. All she’s there for is to be a soundboard for Naomi (exposition) and push her along to do things. She has no life of her own, no desires or motivations. Nothing. She does manage to be extremely annoying, though.

The letters — a part of the book I was really looking forward to — are equally disappointing. I hoped that at least the letters would save it, but they didn’t. Naomi and Luca exchange mean and cruel letters. Sometimes, they include a few sentences of something real, but mostly it’s just mean drivel that’s meant to be funny but isn’t.

I hoped that at some point, their mean letters would turn a bit emotional or confessional, but they never truly do. And I’m not bothered by the meanness, it would have been fine, but I don’t see how they managed to fall in love with each other through these letters.

There’s so much to say about Hate Mail, none of it good. At the very least, it didn’t commit the sin of being too long, though I feel like most of that page count was spent on nothing. It had all the right ingredients to be great, and failed spectacularly. If you’re curious and have Kindle Unlimited or a dollar to spare, you can give it a go (out of curiosity), but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a waste of time.

If you want a romance book that’s actually good, check out my list of best Fall romances here, or the best underrated romances here.

Notes & Highlights

Hate Mail is written in first person POV, from Naomi’s perspective mostly, with Luca’s POV appearing in chapters about the past, and then in the present later on.
This book features a few spicy scenes.
Check the content warnings before reading. Some of them are: death of a parent, a parent abandoning a child, questionable consent (due to hidden identity) and more.