Summary

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

I’m actually really torn on this one… So many people super loved it and RAVED about it, so I was really pumped when I got approved for an egalley of it. And… I don’t know. This is actually bordering somewhere between 2 1/2 stars and 3 stars for me. It’s billed as an adult contemporary romance, but both leads read as really young/immature. The sex scenes are really hot, and I liked a lot of the chemistry between Clara and Josh on the page, but the overall tone and writing style of the book felt very YA to me. Clara is 27 and Josh is I think 25? But with it being Clara’s first time moving away from home and the finding herself plot points, this feels a lot like it should be billed as a New Adult romance and I feel would have read better if both leads’ ages had been shifted down to their early twenties.

Beyond my issues with the ages of the leads not feeling authentic, this book was… okay. It took a while to get into, and both Clara and Josh were pretty unlikable at first. While their interactions with each other grew on me, they both remained quasi-unlikeable characters throughout the entire book. I wouldn’t want either of them for a friend, and in the end what makes a book great *for me* is feeling a connection to the characters. I didn’t have that with The Roommate.

A digital ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley/Edelweiss+ for review. All opinions are unbiased and my own.