I added The Roommate to my to be read list so long ago I forgot what it was about. Not feeling particularly inspired by most of the books I’ve come across recently, I decided to dig into some deep cuts I added to my shelves on Goodreads over the past couple of years. The premise sounded interesting, and it promised a healthy amount of steam, so I reserved this romance by Rosie Danan at the library and waited.
Clara is a squeaky clean socialite looking for a drastic change; in this case change means dropping everything she’s worked toward for years and moving from the East coast to L.A. to live with her childhood crush, Everett Bloom. When Clara arrives at their little bungalow, Everett is waiting with bags packed, ready to go on tour with his band, leaving Clara with a roommate he found on Craigslist and very confused. She believes her family is cursed by scandal, and is convinced her life will be the next in line marked for tragedy when she’s left alone in a city she doesn’t know. But when she digs up some scandalous information about her new roommate it will lead her down an unexpected path toward self-discovery.
The Roommate has an original and interesting plot, but the execution of this romance was lacking in substance. The first 1/4 of the story read like filler and took too long to set up the main conflict: two roommates diving into the promotion of female pleasure and giving the middle finger to a big porn corporation…all while trying to resist the temptation of each other. This story needed more. More character development, more chemistry, and more tension. Clara and Josh have a dynamic that worked for me at times, but mostly their connection was flat. I expected witty banter, arguments dripping with sexual tension, and somewhere along the way that our two protagonists would slip comfortably into the title of lovers. The problem was maybe lying on my end in part, because I think there’s about a 10% chance someone as prudish as Clara would end up with a guy like Josh, who chose sex work because he genuinely enjoys how freeing his profession is; not because he was desperate.
Clara and Josh should have been fleshed out more as individual characters outside of their relationship with each other. Danan just scratches the surface of their pasts to help us understand who they are as people, but her exploration stops short of a real breakthrough. She could have explored Clara’s strained relationship with her mother or built up her newfound relationship with her aunt in L.A. to reveal more about who Clara really is underneath her insecurities. It’s hard to see a character like her next to a character as charming, self-assured, and free-spirited as Josh. It’s endearing how he turns to mush when he thinks about a “normal” girl like Clara being interested in him and his attempts to remedy the situation when he pushes Clara too far. In real life, I don’t think she would be able to leap the hurdle of his involvement in sex work.
The component that worked best in this book was the conversation around the porn industry and female pleasure. A large part deals with Josh rebelling against the studio he’s contracted with due to their mistreatment of adult entertainers. It’s a very sex-positive storyline involving a woman finding out what it’s like to have someone prioritize her please as much as their own (and closing the orgasm gap). A lot of the adult industry neglects pleasure in favor of theatrics, which doesn’t do anything good to our perception of sex. The story hit its stride when they hatch this harebrained scheme that just might work.
The steamy scenes between Clara and Josh are decent, and revolve around pleasure always being mutual and never one sided. That being said, the lack of emotional chemistry between our two leads made their connection feel purely physical. Both Clara and Josh read as immature, meaning once again they fall into the cliché I hate, which is two adults who suck at communication. The scenes they spent time together were few and far between, unless they were related to business. I wanted more cute, awkward moments between the steamy escapades.
I find myself once again having read a book with a lot of potential that let me down in the end. It was an easy read lacking development where it mattered most and I wouldn’t pick it up to read again. This one lands at a 2/5 stars for me. It was fine, but there was nothing remarkable about the overall story.
The Rummy Writer 