Michelle's Reviews > The Lifestyle

It takes a lot of guts in a post-Clueless era to write a modern retelling of Emma. Unfortunately, that’s all this book has going for it. Dry YA prose and paper doll characters with zero interiority; look, I knew this book was not for me when within the first thirty-pages the main character is described as looking like a Disney princess, and specifically which one. It only got worse with the constant fixation on….the Matthew McConaughey film The Lincoln Lawyer??? I mean, I GUESS. (Not to mention half this book is just explaining what outfit a character put on, what transportation they took, and the street and name of the restaurant they went to, including an interminable scene at a Times Square Applebees. We get it, you’re in New York, and you, the author, have been places in that city.)

Beyond the fact this book, like most of contemporary romance I try to read, is decidedly not for me, I was bothered most by the weird-ass old-fashioned gender-essentialist sex shame-y energy throughout and how comically prudish it read. And, beyond that, it’s just, the missed opportunity of it all. There is so much to potentially mine from a story about non-monogamy! But this reads like a caricature (and lets not even get into the fact that girl walks into a sex party and walks out…….wanting her Stock Romance Novel Rugged Hot Ex™? ugh, boring, boring, BORING), and honestly it’s giving bad network sitcom vibes from at least a decade ago.

All I really have to say is, ladies and gentlemen, we are in a crisis. It is a crisis of horny [/Jimmy Carter voice]. But, for the love of god––where are all the sexy books???? And why are the ones that purport to be sexy……..this? IT’S A FAMINE OF SEXY, MY EYES ARE STARVING FOR SEXY (sorry André Leon Talley).

ONE LAST GRIEVANCE: In the year of our lord 2022, I am expected to believe that amidst all these swingers and all these people she knows in New York who wanna fuck around at fuck clubs, not a single blessed one has any interest in the same sex? No one wants to explore that? Please.