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Dirty: A Sexy Novel about a Smutty Start-Up
Not yet published
Expected 4 May 27
Dirty
is Sense and Sensibility set in the porn industry.
When two thirty-something friends lose their dot-com jobs in early 2000’s San Francisco, they pool their severance to start an internet-based business together.
Wallowing in an identity crisis brought on by being an out-of-work Stanford MBA, Nora Kind is on the hunt for her “killer app,” an idea that will prove profitable and earn her a place in the B-school boys’ club. Artist Katie Kleinman, on the other hand, just wants to find a way to keep expressing herself creatively that also pays her mounting bills.
One afternoon at a suburban bridal shower, a male stripper bumps and grinds against a table, knocking a glass of boozy punch to the ground. While the other women in attendance—Katie included—gather to ogle the scantily clad clean-up, Nora spots a lucrative opportunity. On the drive back to the city, Nora suggests she and Katie leverage their experience to start YourFantasyMan.com, a website featuring men in various stages of undress doing household chores. Nora emphasizes an analytical approach, but Katie embraces an edgier aesthetic angle. And neither woman proves immune to temptations of the flesh.
With a series of obstacles instigated by a jealous competitor and Nora’s scorned fiancé threatening the company, the ladies must figure out how to navigate the male-dominated worlds of adult entertainment, local politics, and national criticism. Only by leaning on Nora’s business acumen and Katie’s emotional intelligence will they succeed in their professional and personal quests.
When two thirty-something friends lose their dot-com jobs in early 2000’s San Francisco, they pool their severance to start an internet-based business together.
Wallowing in an identity crisis brought on by being an out-of-work Stanford MBA, Nora Kind is on the hunt for her “killer app,” an idea that will prove profitable and earn her a place in the B-school boys’ club. Artist Katie Kleinman, on the other hand, just wants to find a way to keep expressing herself creatively that also pays her mounting bills.
One afternoon at a suburban bridal shower, a male stripper bumps and grinds against a table, knocking a glass of boozy punch to the ground. While the other women in attendance—Katie included—gather to ogle the scantily clad clean-up, Nora spots a lucrative opportunity. On the drive back to the city, Nora suggests she and Katie leverage their experience to start YourFantasyMan.com, a website featuring men in various stages of undress doing household chores. Nora emphasizes an analytical approach, but Katie embraces an edgier aesthetic angle. And neither woman proves immune to temptations of the flesh.
With a series of obstacles instigated by a jealous competitor and Nora’s scorned fiancé threatening the company, the ladies must figure out how to navigate the male-dominated worlds of adult entertainment, local politics, and national criticism. Only by leaning on Nora’s business acumen and Katie’s emotional intelligence will they succeed in their professional and personal quests.
Paperback
Expected publication May 4, 2027
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
⭐ 1.75 | ❤️ 2.5/5 (a few closed door scenes with a few brief open door moments)
I was drawn to this book due to the fun premise: an entrepreneur, who co-founds a startup inspired by the appeal of male strippers doing household chores. When picking up a book titled Dirty, described as a sexy novel about a smutty startup, and labeled as erotica and romance, you’d expect spice, right?
This is not erotica. I would characterize the spice as cracked door: a few closed door (fade to black) scenes with a few moments of open door that are brief and very tame. I do think there is a market for books like this: it’s for readers who want to read about a titillating topic but without explicit high heat. For a book that is marketed as being sexy, there was a surprising lack of sexual tension. I’d say the majority of the story was focused on the running of the startup.
This is also not a romance; I’d argue that this is actually an anti-romance; there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but romance readers need to know this upfront. If you go into this with the right expectations, you may have a better experience than I had. There are several ‘romantic’ threads; I say romantic loosely for lack of a better word— I would not describe any of these story threads as romantic as we would typically define them. This includes a loveless relationship of convenience, an affair, a sexual rendezvous, and an out-of-left-field situationship. In one case, there is a declaration of love that felt unearned, where I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to buy it. There’s a lack of chemistry between the characters or any of what you might expect from a romance other than instalust.
This book was primarily set in 2002 (as we were reminded repeatedly in a ham-fisted way with the immense volume of references to 2002) at a startup in San Francisco and is narrated by two co-founders— one of whom was web designer Katie. As someone who was a web designer in 2002, lived in San Francisco, and worked at startups, I was often cringing whenever there were mentions of anything pertaining to the role of the web designer / art director due to the subtle inaccuracies. There were also many moments that pulled me out of the story due to the lack of realistic depiction of what running an early angel-funded startup was like (e.g. a co-founder stating that she’s happy with the money in the first year. Founders typically trade off short-term comp with equity early on so they’d be unlikely to be happy with their base salary).
The writing itself was a struggle for me. The prose felt stilted, the dialogue felt wooden and robotic, and there was a lot of telling rather than showing. The characters felt hollow and suffered from resume characterization, which made it hard to feel invested in them. I found myself rooting against our FMC Nora, the CEO of yourfantasyman.com for her self-centeredness, hypocrisy, judgmental attitude towards her supposed friend and peer, and lack of accountability for her actions. Love interest Derek had no discernible personality outside of being hot and existed to help tell the FMCs’ story.
While I appreciated the diverse representation (a Filipino MMC, two East Asian secondary characters, two Black secondary characters), I felt disappointed in the insensitive depiction of Eve, who is a Chinese woman described as having “…a set of shoulders so slight they might have belonged to a ten-year-old boy...” (based on an uncorrected ARC). As an Asian American woman, I found it to be very othering, reductive, infantilizing, and it plays into racial/gender stereotypes. I would have expected a book that has a character who understands privilege to not also include a woman of color described in such an insensitive way. Hopefully this is revised/removed in the published version.
CW: cheating, sexual harassment
This review is based on an ARC provided by Sibylline Press via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
I was drawn to this book due to the fun premise: an entrepreneur, who co-founds a startup inspired by the appeal of male strippers doing household chores. When picking up a book titled Dirty, described as a sexy novel about a smutty startup, and labeled as erotica and romance, you’d expect spice, right?
This is not erotica. I would characterize the spice as cracked door: a few closed door (fade to black) scenes with a few moments of open door that are brief and very tame. I do think there is a market for books like this: it’s for readers who want to read about a titillating topic but without explicit high heat. For a book that is marketed as being sexy, there was a surprising lack of sexual tension. I’d say the majority of the story was focused on the running of the startup.
This is also not a romance; I’d argue that this is actually an anti-romance; there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but romance readers need to know this upfront. If you go into this with the right expectations, you may have a better experience than I had. There are several ‘romantic’ threads; I say romantic loosely for lack of a better word— I would not describe any of these story threads as romantic as we would typically define them. This includes a loveless relationship of convenience, an affair, a sexual rendezvous, and an out-of-left-field situationship. In one case, there is a declaration of love that felt unearned, where I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to buy it. There’s a lack of chemistry between the characters or any of what you might expect from a romance other than instalust.
This book was primarily set in 2002 (as we were reminded repeatedly in a ham-fisted way with the immense volume of references to 2002) at a startup in San Francisco and is narrated by two co-founders— one of whom was web designer Katie. As someone who was a web designer in 2002, lived in San Francisco, and worked at startups, I was often cringing whenever there were mentions of anything pertaining to the role of the web designer / art director due to the subtle inaccuracies. There were also many moments that pulled me out of the story due to the lack of realistic depiction of what running an early angel-funded startup was like (e.g. a co-founder stating that she’s happy with the money in the first year. Founders typically trade off short-term comp with equity early on so they’d be unlikely to be happy with their base salary).
The writing itself was a struggle for me. The prose felt stilted, the dialogue felt wooden and robotic, and there was a lot of telling rather than showing. The characters felt hollow and suffered from resume characterization, which made it hard to feel invested in them. I found myself rooting against our FMC Nora, the CEO of yourfantasyman.com for her self-centeredness, hypocrisy, judgmental attitude towards her supposed friend and peer, and lack of accountability for her actions. Love interest Derek had no discernible personality outside of being hot and existed to help tell the FMCs’ story.
While I appreciated the diverse representation (a Filipino MMC, two East Asian secondary characters, two Black secondary characters), I felt disappointed in the insensitive depiction of Eve, who is a Chinese woman described as having “…a set of shoulders so slight they might have belonged to a ten-year-old boy...” (based on an uncorrected ARC). As an Asian American woman, I found it to be very othering, reductive, infantilizing, and it plays into racial/gender stereotypes. I would have expected a book that has a character who understands privilege to not also include a woman of color described in such an insensitive way. Hopefully this is revised/removed in the published version.
CW: cheating, sexual harassment
This review is based on an ARC provided by Sibylline Press via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Overall this book has a great plot and storyline and good character growth. However, I felt that there was not much depth to the character development, and the growth that was there was a lot more tell than show, which created superficial character development. I also wanted to point out the title with the cover was a little misleading on how much romance is on the page—more than what it is implying. I'm not saying you can't have a closed-door romance, just a heads up that there isn't much that would be nice so people understand more of what they are getting. Overall, a good book just could have had more depth, in my opinion.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews