Touch Up

Rose & Thorns #2

by Katey Hawthorne, J.A. Rock

Last year, twenty-three-year-old actress Dina Gilbert snagged the lead in the summer’s biggest blockbuster. It wasn’t easy: she’s black, openly queer, and has actual curves she refuses to let people Photoshop. Now, overwhelmed by sudden fame and homesick for Georgia, she’s becoming someone she doesn’t recognize. Maybe that’s why she’s out partying her face off most nights.

Enter Colleen Thomas, an ex-model turned photo editor whose issues with her own body are only surpassed by her issues with other peoples’. Colleen knows the rules but Photoshops Dina’s magazine cover anyway, incurring the wrath of Dina and her fans. And, okay, maybe that cover image was unbelievably sexy even before Colleen’s alterations. So what? Dina’s not fooling anyone with that girl-next-door, I-eat-Snickers-in-my-Golden-Globes-dress BS. Colleen knows a train wreck when she sees one.

Tensions rise even more when Colleen and Dina have to work together at the Rose Social Club’s annual charity gala. When they realize they have something in common, no one is more surprised than they are. The sexual chemistry doesn’t hurt either. Their differences could either be a source of strength—a life raft in the heaving waters of Hollywood—or the makings of a titanic crash.

Genres: Romance, Lesbian, LGBT, Contemporary

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 15, 2018

About the author

Hi! I'm Katey. I write superpowered and fantasy romance of an LGBTQIA bent. I live at Superpowered Love -- kateyhawthorne.com.

I know, I know, it looks like I don't read anything here at GoodReads. But I do, I swear. My reviews and stuff are all over at my other GoodReads thingie, KV Taylor. Relevant shelves to Katey Hawthorne stuff:

Romance
LGBTQ
and
Comics, Graphic Novels, and Trade Paperbacks

Reviews

[iam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a hard book to review. It had some parts I liked but partly also really put me off.

Content warnings: fatphobia, drug use, sexism, sex on page, online and sexual harassment, doxxing; mentions of self harm, eating disorders, racism and cultural appropriation.

Let's start at the plot: Dina is a young actress who recently came to be successfull. She's in her early twenties, black, openly queer and "Hollywood fat". The media frames her as the relatable girl-next-door, and Dina mostly enjoys her job and her fame - but things are not as glorious as they seem.
She has a strict no-photoshopping policy when it comes to shoots and covers, so when a heavily edited picture of her appears on a magazine, Dina is furious.

Which brings us to Colleen, a former model turned digital editor. She's biracial with a white mother and a chinese father, and unlike Dina, she has a very unhealthy relationship with at least one of her parents and her body - and the bodies of other people.
When Dina and Colleen meet, it's a disaster. Dina is furious but technically has no legal leg to stand on since no no-photoshopping clause was added in her contract, and Colleen refuses to feel sorry about her edits despite knowing she was acting against Dina's wishes. In fact, Colleen thinks Dina should be thanking her for making her "look good". And yet, even as Colleen picks out the flaws in Dina's appearance that have been drilled into her head from a young age onward, she can't help but find Dina perfect exactly the way she is.

This... obviously isn't a good setup. I usually enjoy the enemies-to-lovers trope but here it didn't quite work for me. The entire first half of the book is so thoroughly unhappy and gives of such rotten vibes it made me queasy, for multiple reasons. There's Colleen's coninued fatphobia, her absolute refusal to admit she did anything wrong and her bleak life, Dina struggling not to crumble under the pressure of fame while telling herself she loves it, intrusive media, overeager fans who don't respect boundaries, the general cis-straight-old-white-male-ness of Hollywood... It's not a good combination.

When Colleen and Dina's relationship developed, it happened suddenly and I wasn't feeling the shift from animosity to genuinely caring for each other, especially from Colleen's side since she never truly apologized, but also from Dina's perspective when Colleen did what she had without remorse.

Then there's the whole plot around the Thorns & Roses fundraiser/gala for young queer female filmmakers that only seems to pop up when it's convenient and otherwise lies forgotten at the side.

Another side thing was Dana, Dina's co-star and love interest in a YA zombie movie series, who has severe anxiety. He was an interesting character but it felt like the book didn't really know what to do with him.

Reading Touch-Up in general felt... not exactly aimless but without a clear goal. Many topics were picked up or mentioned just to be forgotted or sidelined without a real conclusion or confrontation.

Furthermore, the writing style didn't click with me. It was easy to read and flowed well, but at times the way things were written or conveyed made me feel very uncomfortable.

I received an ARC in and reviewed voluntarily.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was provided for free by the author and Love Bytes in exchange for an honest review.

This review was first posted to Love Bytes: LGBTQ Book Reviews. It has been slightly edited here for content.

If you’ve read any of my reviews before this one, you know that I love complicated women. Messy women, flawed women, women who make mistakes. But often, in romance, those complicated women come together to create something soft and sweet and light, relinquishing everything that made them interesting in the name of love. That is so not the case with Dina and Colleen in this book. These two are a hot mess, and even as they start to fall hard for each other, they know love cannot heal all wounds.

Dina Gilbert is the young star of a hit YA film franchise that has catapulted her to unimaginable fame. She’s curvy and proud of it, but when ex-model and current photo editor Colleen Thomas retouches a cover photo of Dina to slim her down, Dina is livid. She and Colleen immediately butt heads—Dina can’t stand Colleen’s shallow opinions of beauty, and Colleen is so over Dina’s childish outlook on fame and fortune. But through gritted apologies, they begin to understand each other a little more, and sparks start flying.

I’m absolutely in love with the sex scenes in this book. Like, wow, they are total fire, but they’re also hilariously realistic. So few F/F romances go deeper into what female bodies actually do during good sex—the noises, the fluids, the sticky aftermath. It’s so wonderfully intimate and well-written. I think any modern woman can relate to Dina’s impressive sex toy collection or the feeling of waking up after some self-loving and feeling like you’ve been run over by a truck. Women who love women aren’t grossed out or put off by those details—we adore them. And these authors totally nailed it.

It would be too easy to call either character unlikable. Colleen is a product of bad parenting and parasitic industry—she’s impossibly shallow, sharp, and not afraid to point out flaws that you’d rather keep hidden. But as a half-Asian woman within a cutthroat industry, her survival hinged on being aloof, and it never came at a low cost. She’s hard because she refused to be swallowed whole. But after meeting Dina and seeing how the industry will eat you alive either way, she has to take a step back and see if this is really how she wants to live the rest of her life. It took me a while to like Colleen. I’m a curvy girl myself, so I could never be with a woman who sought to slim me down. But Colleen’s fatphobia and body consciousness is rooted in something deep and dark, and it really has nothing to do with how she actually feels about Dina.

Dina herself is an excellent picture of young, modern Hollywood women who really do have to have it all to be considered admirable. I can definitely see how she was influenced by stars like Jennifer Lawrence or Emma Stone who bank on being your quirky BFF even when they’re winning Oscars and making millions of dollars. And Dina is also a black woman, so she’s trying to win the uphill battle of being admired by everyone, from the industry execs to her family back home in Georgia. So when she breaks down, she breaks down hard, and it’s like watching a car crash.

If you’re looking for your next light, fluffy read, this one isn’t it. It’s tough and complex. The characters say cruel, hurtful things to each other to mask their own pain, and forgiveness never comes easily. It requires you to take pity and sympathize with women commonly written off as bitches in other forms of media. But the love between Dina and Colleen is so wonderfully rewarding by the end, and they feel like two real woman who exist today.

[Dannica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hm... I'm not really sure what to say about this. I'm very much looking forward to what other reviewers have to say. But I'll still give it a shot.
(I'm very likely to edit this review later after I've given it more thought. Kind of wobbly still.)

I mostly liked Dina Gilbert's character. She's sometimes out of control, with a drug habit and a partying lifestyle, but she's still relatable (lols) and actually kind of charming with the narrative voice used for her segments as well as her frank assertiveness. Did I ship her with Colleen? Ehh... I wasn't as big a fan of Colleen because her character felt less fleshed out and I thought her attitude towards Dina was not ideal. So I wasn't so sold on the romance. I was convinced Dina and Colleen were attracted to each other but beyond that, again, ehh. Colleen never sufficiently makes up for photoshopping Dina imo, and her regret over it never quite seems real. Also, why would she do that in the first place when it would place her job in jeopardy and maybe start a fight with a superstar? Even for someone with body issues, that's a big risk to take.

But tbh the romance is not as big an aspect of this novel as you might think. A lot of it's focused around, well...anything and everything else. Discussing the politics of being a black, queer, and fat actress in Hollywood. Discussing body image issues. Discussing the politics of being a biracial half-Asian model. Etc, etc. I like a book that's willing to discuss issues but this book went a little overboard for me. Some of the conversations between Dina and Colleen read more like Twitter debates or blog posts than conversations I can imagine people having in real life, and while that might have to do with the people I hang out with, it still kind of broke my suspension of disbelief. Besides, it just got a little boring. I enjoy discussing privilege and the like as much as the next person but ultimately it's the characters and plot of a book that invest me in it, not so much its efforts to discuss liberal politics.

Also, we see a lot of these issues getting discussed, not a lot of what they mean in practice. E.g. We see Dina and Colleen argue over whether Dina's photo should have been photoshopped, but we don't really see anyone other than Colleen fat-shaming her. We see Dina object to a not-so-feminist line in a movie, but we don't see a lot of sexism. So it feels more like a lot of philosophical debate than an exploration of what these marginalizations--queer, black, fat, female, biracial, Asian, anorexic--mean in action.

This, though, is where I'd really like to see other reviewers' input. Because I'm only two of those things--queer and female--and while the discussion of sexism and maybe a little discussion of what it means to be queer didn't so much speak to me, I'm not confident saying none of this would be important to someone else. I also think this aspect of the novel is understandable; when you're a public figure, a lot of life really must be working through the politics and the nitty gritty, having a public face and official stances. It's just not very compelling, at least to me.

Mm what else. Uh, all the above about debate overload applies to the first half more than the second. In the second half the story becomes more focused. Dina and Colleen's relationship starts, various shit goes down. I still wasn't super interested bc I didn't really ship Dina and Colleen, but I still did enjoy seeing Dina maybe mature a little towards the end (though, is it really that easy to kick a drug habit?), and I enjoyed her character in general--though at times she could get a little cringey. Oh, and there was some stuff about actually working on a movie that was fun, and more development of a couple side-relationships, like Dina's relationships with her costars. So that was nice.

Overall... I think maybe this book just wasn't for me. Which I sort of suspected from the summary, but I liked Off Limits enough that I wanted to give the rest of the series a shot. I probably will continue with the series if I can but I wasn't so into this one.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Leah]

DNF ~35%

I had multiple issues with the book in the portion that I read, which are explained in my review.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fame isn't as glamorous as it seems for Dina Gilbert whose difficulty to cope with it brings her to a dangerous path in this charming and captivating romance.

Dina Gilbert is a rising star becoming overwhelmed by the fame that is making her act in a way she doesn't recognize anymore. Colleen Thomas is a photo editor who had the task to do Dina's magazine cover, with a well-known rule of not Photoshopping that she decided to ignore. Now she has to face the wrath of the actress, while they are forced to work together at the Rose Social Club's annual charity gala. But the attraction they feel for each other starts to outweigh the constant disputes they get themselves into.

This was an amazing book. I wasn't expecting to like it that much, but there was something in the blurb that just got my attention very quickly. The book keeps a nice, steady pace. It is very well written and it's so enthralling that I just couldn't put it down. Dina and Colleen are both really charming characters. I loved how much contrast there was between them. Dina so self-assured and trying to be a positive role model to her fans, being a black queer and curvy women and Collen having so much issues with her body that didn't allow her to accept herself. Both fighting with their own demons in their own way. They make such a lovely couple. I loved the moments they share when they weren't fighting, it was so fun and sweet that it was easy to care for them as a couple.

Overall, it was a very charming and romantic book. I had a wonderful time reading it. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a lighthearted and fun romance. It is F/F pairing, which is not exactly my favorite, but the book is so well written and so entertaining and the characters so beautifully made, that I simply loved it. It was a fantastic book.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost didn’t read this book. I enjoyed the first book in the series, Off Limits, and only after I finished it, realized that this was not a single-author series, that this book and the others in the series would have different authors from the book I’d already enjoyed.

But it was available on Kindle Unlimited, so I gave this book a try. And I’m mostly glad I did. Glad enough that I considered five-starring it (which, for me, is a rarity). In the end, it fell slightly short for me. I found the cocaine use was really difficult for me to read: I find it difficult to relate to. As the book went on, I felt better able to place it in the context of Dina’s life, but it is so foreign to my experience that I found I needed to fight a bit harder than I normally would to sympathize with her and not just give up on the book.

I’m very glad I read it, and even though I wish there was more of Dina and Colleen’s story to read, I’ll try the next book in this series. But I’m also going to look for some of the other work of this book’s authors.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waffled on whether this was 3.5 or 4 stars for me only because it look me a minute to get into the story. I don't know if these characters were introduced more in book #1 and that's why I felt like I didn't get much backstory, but it felt like something was missing at the beginning.

That being said, I think this is a great Sapphic romance that's a little light on enemies to lovers. Both characters are BIPOC (Black and Asian American) and Katey did a great job of highlighting the intrinsic issues and pigeon holes these women get while being in a industry obsessed with image and public consumption.

Without going too far into the details of the story, I felt like the ending was much more believable then some MF traditional romances go. There was no large, emotive 'I love you' scene and the couple just ended deciding to keep trying. Each character is flawed in their own ways but there's no immediate resolution to deeply seated traumas from growing up - because that's not way happens in real life.

I'd definitely recommend giving this a read!

[Elizabeth]

DNF’d.

Sorry but I just couldn’t get into this story. I’m thinking this could be a me thing so maybe I’ll pick it up again another time, who knows.

Happy Reading Everyone🤓

[Ness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gimme a minute...

The way they write... far out it's like the meat and muscle's on the outside of the body with little hearts stuck all over it
I freaking love it!

[Fat Amy Santiago]

DNF. I can tell no black women or mixed-race women were consulted on this book. I might have been able to push forward and see if it improved past the 40% mark but I had just finished reading Off Limits, the first in this series, and it was much more enjoyable. It's possible that affected me but for now, it's a no from me.