I’m not going to break new ground in reviewing here. Trade Me is every bit as great as one should come to expect from a Courtney Milan romance, with her trademark mixture of iconoclastic female characters, wit, progressive agenda, and wonderful chemistry between her main players. Brevity is the soul of this plot summary: Tina Chen, a student of low financial means, “trades places” for a semester with Blake Reynolds, young billionaire, after the former challenges the latter that he wouldn’t last two weeks in […]
Courtney Milan does it again. Now with New Adult
4.5 stars Disclaimer! I was given an ARC of this through NetGalley in return for a fair and unbiased review. Of course, it being a Courtney Milan book, I had also already pre-ordered it, because I will buy anything she writes, even if said thing is a scientific treatise on spiders and cockroaches (the things that creep my out the most). If Ms. Milan ever reads this – please don’t ever write a book like that. I will buy it, but I might not like […]
Feminist wish fulfillment fantasy at it’s entertaining finest.
Trade Me is a fun read you can feel good about. Last year I spent months rereading and contemplating Courtney Milan’s brilliant and overtly feminist The Brothers Sinister series. The series was set in Victorian England in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when women had few legal rights and the opinion of others could mean the difference between safety and disaster. Trade Me is Milan’s first contemporary romance and is no less bold. There are no overt misogynists or blatantly gender based obstacles […]
New Adult Romance, Not New Age Romance, Fortunately
I have already reread it. In historical romance’s greatest writer (and increasingly open iconoclast) Courtney Milan’s latest novel, Trade Me, her work steps sideways into the New Adult genre. In their early twenties, the main characters are young enough to be my children, but instead of putting me off, it created a similar kind of narrative distance to the historical elements in the romances I generally prefer. So much has changed since I was that age that this really is a different world for […]