Roommate

by Sarina Bowen

[lessthelonely]

3.5/5 stars.

You know what I was needing after a bunch of time not reading much? A quick read to get me back into reading. And considering I really enjoyed another book co-written by this author, I decided to give one of her solos a try.

First, I would like to mention that I have a vague idea that this author is problematic. Or maybe that would be the other co-author of Him, Elle Kennedy. But the truth is I don’t feel responsible for more success coming to any of these women’s ways, as I read this book for free.

But about this book: I feel like the best thing I can do is compare it to my other reference. The Him series (for which I’ve reviewed Book 1 and haven’t gotten around to read Book 2) seems to be incredibly popular and considering I did enjoy that book a lot, I can see why. I feel like I now start to see some decisions made in romance books as clear faults, but I still finish books with said faults because, to be completely honest, the smut still hits.

That is the bar, ladies, gents, and non-binary folks. That is where I’m at in life: if the smut is good, we can power through it.

In my defense, smut is only good if the romance is also good, because if I wanted to read porn, I would just grab a book that started exactly with that. But my favorite part of romance books keeps being the build-up to the first times. I assumed that both Elle Kennedy and Sarina Bowen are up to par in the compliments I’m about to give the latter, since the book I reviewed by them that I keep mentioning was top tier in that regard, but damn.

This is a romance done right, though it has a few icks. The romance is clear from the get-go, and you can tell who the main character is and who the love interest is, though this is a dual POV book. You can tell which one is entirely written as a fine piece of man meat and who is written as attractive but nothing over the top. And this isn’t really an ick, in fact, I kind of appreciate it because it can get annoying if the book beats around the bush for too long.

Either way, I feel like romance books, even though you can tell what their main audience is, are the ones where you get the most realistic portrayals of family. Fantasy most often doesn’t go with family tropes (their death tends to be the inciting incident). Look at me talking as if a book is either romance, fantasy or both. But you can read the conversations and I felt like I was having an argument with my family, because the amount of stubbornness, just complete lack of engaging with your complaints in a serious manner… It hit close to home.

The romance was nice and sweet. I feel like I read this book fast enough for some things to stick out that usually don’t: for example, I felt like the jump from started fooling around to can’t breathe without each other was a little quick, but truth is I enjoy this. Because it’s true to me, I guess, being the very much affection deprived bitch I am.

Other than that, there was a Yaaas that made me feel very… uncomfortable. Because do gay people say Yaaas? Yes. But there’s a time and place. And the fact that Roderick was made flamboyant through stereotypes like that one.

But still, I enjoyed this.