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A review by emmalthompson85
His Cocky Cellist by Cole McCade
2.5
DNF at about 50%.
I tried to stick this out so much because of all the good reviews and maybe I'm just being too picky. It's not like the writing's bad. The narrator is fucking fantastic. I even liked the characters, if finding them a bit much occasionally.
My main issue was this book hit a trope that apparently I and only I hate so much which is when am unreasonably rich person offers someone a large sum of money to do a thing and instead of jumping on it because fuck the rich, their pride is wounded and they throw a fit. This book treats it as so self-evident that offering to overpay a stranger for music lessons was bad that it doesn't even really explain why it's bad. Like, throwing it out there, any local billionaires want to pay me thousands to spend a little free time teaching them a skill I have, I'm in!
To make it worse, the character who was so deeply offended to be asked for music lessons then later actively encourages the billionaire to pay him for sex. Like, do we have our pride or not? Not that you can't be proud and a sex worker but you can also be proud and give cello lessons. Offering money for cello lessons is a grave insult but offering money for sex is absolutely fine?
And then I'm into picking mode. The instant bi which, look, if you're going to do gay for you fucking work for it. It would alter literally nothing in this book to have him bi from the start. We have a kink scene with a crap safe word (towel. A towel is a thing one might reasonably have closer to hand while having sex and may even say during the act, creating confusion about of you've safeworded or not) and an undernegotiated scene (no, both filling out a form in silence is not a negotiation. Just because you tick on a form you might want to try a thing sometime doesn't mean you want to do it now). And then we have poor health as a moral failing. His blood pressure is high because he's stressed and doesn't take care of himself! And clearly having medicated high blood pressure is terrible. (As opposed to it being a normal thing that happens to some bodies and isn't medicine great).
So you can see the headspace I got into with this book.
It's not a bad book, it's a very bad book for me, though.
I tried to stick this out so much because of all the good reviews and maybe I'm just being too picky. It's not like the writing's bad. The narrator is fucking fantastic. I even liked the characters, if finding them a bit much occasionally.
My main issue was this book hit a trope that apparently I and only I hate so much which is when am unreasonably rich person offers someone a large sum of money to do a thing and instead of jumping on it because fuck the rich, their pride is wounded and they throw a fit. This book treats it as so self-evident that offering to overpay a stranger for music lessons was bad that it doesn't even really explain why it's bad. Like, throwing it out there, any local billionaires want to pay me thousands to spend a little free time teaching them a skill I have, I'm in!
To make it worse, the character who was so deeply offended to be asked for music lessons then later actively encourages the billionaire to pay him for sex. Like, do we have our pride or not? Not that you can't be proud and a sex worker but you can also be proud and give cello lessons. Offering money for cello lessons is a grave insult but offering money for sex is absolutely fine?
And then I'm into picking mode. The instant bi which, look, if you're going to do gay for you fucking work for it. It would alter literally nothing in this book to have him bi from the start. We have a kink scene with a crap safe word (towel. A towel is a thing one might reasonably have closer to hand while having sex and may even say during the act, creating confusion about of you've safeworded or not) and an undernegotiated scene (no, both filling out a form in silence is not a negotiation. Just because you tick on a form you might want to try a thing sometime doesn't mean you want to do it now). And then we have poor health as a moral failing. His blood pressure is high because he's stressed and doesn't take care of himself! And clearly having medicated high blood pressure is terrible. (As opposed to it being a normal thing that happens to some bodies and isn't medicine great).
So you can see the headspace I got into with this book.
It's not a bad book, it's a very bad book for me, though.