Reading This Man By Jodi Ellen Malpas — What You Actually Need to Know
I picked up This Man By Jodi Ellen Malpas on a lazy Tuesday because the cover looked fine and I had nothing better to do. I finished it in two days. Not because it was some life-changing masterpiece, but because it is exactly what it claims to be: a steamy romance with a brooding alpha male, a woman who should not be into him, and a whole lot of tension that resolves predictably by page 300. Here is the thing most people miss when they approach this book. It is not trying to be literary fiction. It is not trying to deconstruct the genre. It is pulpy romantic fiction at its most honest, and that honesty is actually its strength. The pacing is brisk, the dialogue is functional, and the romantic chemistry between Christian and Tessa is written with enough conviction that you stop questioning the plot holes.
Understanding This Man By Jodi Ellen Malpas
The novel follows Christian Blake, a wealthy businessman with serious control issues, and Tessa Lloyd, a young woman navigating an unexpected relationship with him. The basic premise is straightforward. Christian has spent his life building walls. Tessa walks through them. He pushes her away. She comes back. Repeat until the final chapter. What makes it work in practice is the character interiority. Malpas writes from both perspectives, which means you see Christian's trauma and insecurity even as he does Things That Are Absolutely Not Okay. That dual POV is where the book earns its romance cred. You are not just watching a hot rich man badmouth a girl. You are inside his head, and inside it, he is genuinely trying to figure out how to be good for someone. It is annoying, it is flawed, and it is exactly the kind of emotional logic this genre requires. I ran into a specific issue when discussing this book with readers who wanted straight recommendations for the series. The books do not come in the reading order most people assume. People start with This Man, then go to This End, then This Forever. That works. But if you want the complete sequence, the full title list is This Man, This End, and This Forever. Starting elsewhere will leave you confused about character history, particularly regarding Christian's sister and his complicated family dynamics.
The series also has a companion book called Once Upon a Time, which focuses on different characters from the same universe. It is not required reading, but it does fill in some backstory that makes the main trilogy hit harder if you already know the context. I found that readers who skipped the companion book and then jumped back into it later felt like they were getting free content. Those who read the companion first sometimes found the reveals in the main trilogy less impactful.
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The Actual Reading Experience
Let me be direct about the flaws so you know what you are getting into. The dialogue is sometimes overly dramatic. Characters say things like I have never felt this way before with a intensity that borders on parody, and then proceed to do exactly the same thing they have been doing for 200 pages. The conflict is manufactured repeatedly. Christian makes a decision based on incomplete information. Tessa gets angry. They separate. They reunite. The cycle happens three times across three books with minor variations. Some of the scenes cross into territory that is uncomfortable for modern readers. Christian's control over Tessa's life, especially early on, reads very differently now than it probably did when the book was published in 2014. The power imbalance is central to the appeal for some readers and a dealbreaker for others. There is no middle ground here. If you are coming to this from Fifty Shades of Grey, which it is frequently compared to, the difference is mostly in the writing quality. Malpas is more consistent with her prose, and the emotional arc is more developed over three books instead of one stretched-out installment. The tropes are the same — billionaire, virgin heroine, intense sexual tension, emotional abuse disguised as passion — but they are executed with more narrative care.
Series Progression
Each book in the trilogy handles a different phase of the relationship. This Man is the meeting and the attraction. This End is the breakup and the consequences. This Forever is the resolution and the commitment. Reading them in order matters more than it normally would in romance because the emotional cause-and-effect is tracked carefully across all three. The ending of the third book satisfies the genre but does not pretend to be realistic relationship advice. Christian and Tessa end up together, yes, but the book acknowledges the damage that happened along the way. It does not erase it. That acknowledgment is what separates this series from a lot of similar fiction that wraps everything up in a neat bow and acts like nothing went wrong. I would recommend this series to anyone who enjoys the contemporary romance genre and does not mind a hero who is deeply broken but working toward being better. It is not for readers who want a perfectly healthy relationship model or complex political commentary. It is for people who want to feel something while reading about two people who are terrible for each other until they are not.
