By: Rosie Danan
Blurb:
House Rules:
Do your own dishes.
Knock before entering the bathroom.
Never look up your roommate online.
The Wheatons are infamous among the east coast elite for their lack of impulse control, except for their daughter Clara. She’s the consummate socialite: over-achieving, well-mannered, predictable. But every Wheaton has their weakness. When Clara’s childhood crush invites her to move cross-country, the offer is too much to resist. Unfortunately, it’s also too good to be true.
After a bait-and-switch, Clara finds herself sharing a lease with a charming stranger. Josh might be a bit too perceptive—not to mention handsome—for comfort, but there’s a good chance he and Clara could have survived sharing a summer sublet if she hadn’t looked him up on the Internet…
Once she learns how Josh has made a name for himself, Clara realizes living with him might make her the Wheaton’s most scandalous story yet. His professional prowess inspires her to take tackling the stigma against female desire into her own hands. They may not agree on much, but Josh and Clara both believe women deserve better sex. What they decide to do about it will change both of their lives, and if they’re lucky, they’ll help everyone else get lucky too.
Review:
The Roommate is an opposites-attract romance. You’ve got a trust fund debutant whose main goal in life is to make her mother proud by not causing scandal. On the opposite side is a go with the flow porn star who walked away from his family when they didn’t respond well to his career choice. I’m not going to say you can’t get more different than that, but it’s definitely not the couple you expect to happen.
Clara is more than a bit repressed. She has a Ph.D. in art history, has never lived more than an hour away from her mother, and has had a crush on her lifelong friend, Everett. Your introduction to him makes you question all of her decisions cause he’s a selfish dick.
Josh is Clara’s surprise roommate. She’s never watched porn and doesn’t find out that he’s a porn star until someone else points it out. He’s been floating through life and has a bit of an inferiority complex that he hides with his career choice. I appreciated that he didn’t come from a bad home environment. The Roommate was very sex-positive and pro-sex worker. None of them were painted as damaged. They were smart and comfortable with themselves and their sexuality.
I expected there to be an indecent proposal situation, and there were definitely moments that bordered on that, but for the most part, the relationship was almost a love-at-first-sight storyline. Sex played a huge role in the story, but the romance between them was sweet. There were lustful thoughts and gazes, but there were just as many, if not more, instances where they were cooking or talking about action movies and life.
I enjoyed The Roommate a lot. It followed a book that I really loved, so the fact that I liked it so much says nothing but good things about The Roommate. Goodreads doesn’t have this set up as a series, but looking at the author’s page, it seems like a sequel is being published in a couple of months. There were several characters that I felt could have their own book, so that makes me happy.
4/5
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