Review: Hard Sell by Lauren Layne
Hard Sell is the Follow up to Hot Asset. It is a rivals to lovers fake dating (for a reason that baffled me, but I can try to be accommodating toward) romance.
I sort of had all the same issues with book to that I had with book one, the narrators are slightly better this time around, both because I speed them up and because I am used to them now. But the romance still didn't dive deeply enough into their internal conflict for my liking. We solve the third act conflict with a grand gesture and not with actually working out the problems in a way I would have found more satisfying. I still dislike the way this author writes sex, and I still think this series is incredibly conservative in its world view.
This book makes reference to a few women who make money via sex work. The first is a stripper who is not treated like a person by the narrative but instead is the terrible thing that happened to the hero and is mostly treated as a joke. She is constantly referred to as the stripper who gave a lackluster lapdance. The second is a woman who dabbled in full service sex work, prostitution, who is absolutely a villain in this story. She gets zero empathy or redeeming qualities.
This book does seem to mostly hate women who are not going to be the heroine of their own book in this series. With the exception of the lawyer in book one almost every woman named (maybe with the exception of the best friend in book one who left immediately after her plot relevance was over) is a bad person or causes harm to the heroes.
This series also traffics in the 'no woman mattered to me before her' which I am meant to find charming but I cannot because the underlying shittiness of this assertion is literally never explored. The mostly nameless women of the past are treated as blanketly unworthy, or as collateral damage to get the hero to the heroine. The heroines past romantic or sexual history is not engaged with at all in a really weird way. I just wish their was a single ounce of empathy for the tossed aside women the populate these books and book like it. Treat your male characters like humans, want them to treat women well and to have remorse when they didn't. That would be a much mor ecompelling narrative.
The heroine of this book is supposedly the best friend of the hero in the previous book but this series treats their relationship so weirdly. It basically passes this heroine to the heroine of the previous book because it wasnt to enshrine the hierarchy of romantic love over platonic love. These 'best friends' barely speak to each other, he does not ask her to be in the wedding his fiancee does, and it is explicitly stated twice that this life long friendship that came about through shared trauma is inherently less valuable than romantic love. Why can't they just be best friends without making it a competition? I am baffled.
This series is also weird about food. It absolutely does the cool girls eat real food thing, while also maintaining a pretty fatphobic undertone throughout the novels.
Last complaint, this book treats poor people exceptionally poorly. We have two characters who bootstrapped their way out of poverty. And one still poor person who is kind of a lovable joke, but the rest of the poor people are inherently unable to maintain family units, and bring society nothing but misery. It is an incredibly unkind and deeply conservative and paternalistic way of viewing people in poverty. I legitimately hate this.
I thought the plot was fine, I'm going to read book three mostly so I can be assured that this author is not at all for me.
I gave this book two stars.
