Who knew a book involving Only Fans could be so boring?
First things first: From a reader’s perspective, it looked like Aiden was having a parasocial relationship with “Cici”, and the author and everybody in the book thought that was totally fine. I couldn’t find a single way to make any of it okay in my head. I thought all of the online interactions (which are all purely sexual) interspersed throughout the book made Aiden sound like an absolute creep, knowing he was trying to meet her in real life. By the time the story EVEN BEGINS, Cassie’s webcamming days are long behind her, which made me wonder why make it a major fixture of the plot in the first place?
No shade to Only Fans, everybody’s gotta eat and live so you do what you gotta do, but you do NOT. MEET. MEN on there!!!!!!!!!!! This heroine was dumb af and he should probably be questioned by police. Wanda kept making jokes about him locking her in the basement but TRULY if this were reality, it would have ended more like a true crime podcast.
But let’s just pretend sex workers, especially women, don’t routinely get stalked. That’s so not a thing, right?
There was a big to-do about Sophie being such a difficult child who ran off several nannies already, but it turned out she was just, like, a normal child? And Cassie wins her over in one or two interactions via regular human decency? That was odd.
Aiden’s entire character consisted of “trying” now that Sophie’s mom isn’t around, and struggling with the work-parenting balance. But I guess you can just make him say “good girl” once and all is forgotten. You can’t just write a “romance” between the two busiest people on earth so you don’t have to make them have a real conversation or any actual reasons to fall in love.
Every single chapter, I had to read their small talk and discussing their plans for the day. I had to sit through Cassie taking Sophie and her new friend to the zoo. I had to read about Aiden’s work crises, like scallions being left out of the refrigerator. I had to read sex scenes about the most two-dimensional characters I’ve ever read about going at it like robots reciting lines from some sort of AI porn. Speaking of robots, Aiden seemed to be malfunctioning and constantly repeating the phrases, “I’m trying,” and “Everyone’s a critic”—to which Cassie was programmed to respond, “Poor baby.”
Eventually Cassie realizes that once Aiden sees the scar that he’s seen in her video, he’ll know it’s her (coincidentally, the same way she recognized him). She’s desperate not to lose her job and the supposed relationship she’s built with this family, yet she doesn’t think twice about boinking Aiden in an Airbnb bathroom with Sophie in the next room. What does she think is going to happen with this mess?? I wish I hadn’t stuck around to find out. I read 400 pages where there’s no plot, what little tension there was vanishes after some thirty-second coitus in the first half, and the DILF that was promised never appears. There’s actually a part where Cassie tells Aiden that, unfortunately, she doesn’t have a daddy kink. Really? Because that would have been one small bone you could have thrown us to make this snoozefest marginally more interesting.
And let me reiterate that this was FOUR HUNDRED PAGES. I kept thinking there can’t possibly be more and then there was. By page 250 I was skimming the rest and I don’t think I missed anything.
Also, this was a book about a chef that doesn’t cook for her once in the whole book. He does repeatedly ruin pancakes though, because he inexplicably can’t manage to get that right. And I’m convinced the author has never met a human child.
The end.