I started out excited to read this, but it lost me pretty quickly. The last few times I've picked it up it's been out of the desire to get it over with as quickly as possible, so I finally cut myself some slack and dnfed it.

for a book that markets itself as sexy and sex-positive, Williams' main character is an erotica author who has an incredible amount of disdain towards the genre. she talks about it as though women who write erotica (and especially bdsm erotica) are somehow being prevented from creating works of real literary merit (like Seven Days in June, I'm guessing) because capitalism means that they have to write easy books that sell well. truly a huge slap in the face to every woman out there who writes erotica. it's a huge red flag when someone thinks there is no art or care when it comes to writing about sex. it's specifically insulting to bdsm authors and people in the bdsm community. Williams' cringey take on a bdsm-themed restaurant just showcases that she's one of many, many people who think that the only sexual ethics are consent and using a condom and that there is no more to it than that. it's lazy, boring, and harmful writing about sex from someone who thinks that smut is the easiest thing to sell. not coincidentally, i got halfway through and despite references to PornHub and vaginas there were no sex scenes and nothing sexy at all. telling me a character is hot is not the same thing as writing a sexy story! speculation: I bet there are one or two sex scenes later on that are as bad as the ones from Red, White & Royal Blue (though at least Williams isn't a white person writing about a gay person of color, unlike McQuiston).

all of this made me very, very wary of the book but none of it is why I stopped reading it. having given time to similarly shitty novels written by white people (McQuiston, Klune) I thought that I wasn't losing out by reading one written by a Black woman. having just read Maya Dusenberry's Doing Harm, I was even happy to see that Williams wrote a romance novel about a character with chronic migraines based on her own experience and that the portrayal of being shuffled from doctor to doctor and dismissed with a shrug and a prescription for painkillers closely matched the reality of how the health care system treats women. but it's just so actively unfunny. every two pages I'm hit in the face with a pop culture name drop (saying the name of a Kendrick Lamar album is not a reference), a smirky Star Wars quote said by a "cool" character, or a tedious take on how modern liberal life is so open-minded that it's quirky:

"Speaking of doctors," said Belinda, "my gyno just performed a goddess ritual on my vagina. She steamed it, saged it, and then spoke wisdom into my crotch."

OH MY GOD WHO THINKS THIS IS EDGY OR FUNNY. I could not take 175ish more pages of this