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I had never read a billionaire romance before reading Courtney Milan's Trade Me, so while I have lots of respect for Courtney Milan as a romance writer and a human trying to write progressively, I had a sort of vague expectation that this probably wasn't going to be my favorite of her books.

But weirdly, it turned out I was wrong and actually this might be my literal favorite of Courtney Milan's books?

(Well, maybe with the exception of Unraveled, which I have a very deep fondness for, for reasons that I can't entirely explain. -- OK, socially awkward protagonists and plucky urchins and found family and DEDICATION TO JUSTICE!!!, I actually totally can explain it. Unraveled was a really enjoyable book for my id.)

Anyway! Trade Me is set at Berkeley; our heroine, Tina Chen, who is working herself through college as well as financially assisting her family. Also attending Berkeley is Blake, the super-rich and super-famous son of the super-rich and super-famous guy who founded a start-up that is TOTALLY not Apple. They clash one day in class when Blake says something privileged and condescending in a discussion about food stamps; Tina, possibly the only one in the class whose family has ever been on food stamps, finally snaps and calls him on it, and Blake is smitten.

This leads to an elaborate deception plot in which Blake attempts to flee the pressures of his responsibilities at Totally Not Apple and his dad's expectations by convincing Tina to trade lives with him: she gets his house! his car! the income from his truly enormous portfolio! the responsibility of taking charge on the launch of his company's newest super-snazzy tech device! Meanwhile, he gets her crappy apartment! and a crappy job that has equivalent crappy income to her crappy job! and the absolute minimum level of contact with Totally Not Apple!

This seems like the setup for a lot of HIJINKS!! but actually it's mostly just the opportunity for a.) a lot of exploration of class and privilege and b.) for each of them to get involved with each other's families, which, it turns out, is the reason I liked this book so much: Blake and Tina's families, but Tina's especially, are both so interesting. Milan does a really amazing job writing parental relationships that feel complicated, genuinely loving, and genuinely problematic. Tina's mother is a brilliant, funny, dedicated woman who throws herself into volunteer legal work for her community, but the financial needs of her own family -- including stuff like her younger daughter's ADHD medication -- come terrifyingly low on her priorities list; Blake's affectionate asshole of a father takes enormous amounts of time to incorporate his son into his life and makes sure he knows he's a priority to him, but he also puts the same kind of enormous and unhealthy amounts of pressure on him as he does on himself. The great thing about these family portraits is also how they deftly avoid the usual stereotypes about "overbearing Chinese immigrant mother!" and "work-obsessed billionaire father!" The cultural expectations and pressures of Chinese-American communities and Silicon Valley start-up land do play major roles in the family dynamics, but in a way that (to me at least) feels very real and not at all paint-by-numbers.

Also, personally speaking, I love metafiction and explorations of staged 'real life,' so I was really into the whole "Blake's life has been turned into commercials and product launches since he was an adorable child!" thing. I also love gallant, unstoppable fighters for JUSTICE, see above, and TINA'S MOM IS SUCH A GOOD CHARACTER, would happily read a whole book about her.

But instead we're getting a whole book about Tina's awesome trans roommate Maria, which, ALSO DOWN FOR THAT.

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Unraveled is my favorite of hers too and now I'm tempted to use the last of my iTunes' money from trading in my phone to buy this.

It was my plane reading for the last trip I took, and I devoured it in a single gulp (instead of doing any of the stuff I actually meant to do on that airplane, oops.)

Ooh, that's a great recommendation.

Huh. This actually sounds kind of awesome? Like I have zero problems with billionaire romances or romances of any kind, but they tend to be mediocre and this one sounds... really really good. Must locate.

I don't know very much about the standard billionaire romance tropes except what I've osmosed, but other people's reviews lead me to believe that this book is not much like most billionaire romances (the hero is not an alpha male or an asshole! the heroine is not drowning in insecurities about her looks! nobody is anybody's secretary! class issues are genuinely addressed! Blake's privilege doesn't make his problems less real or worthy of sympathy, but it does mean that he has more means to deal with them than somebody else would who had the same problems but not the privilege and he's got to understand that!)

I'm actually working on something rather similar (except the billionaire is a lady and not living like one, so she's like a Sekrit Billionaire? IDEK) so I feel like I should read this as a sort of helper book. Like, how does Milan deal with it, how could I deal with it, and so on.

AND ALSO all of those things are true. Oh my god so many alpha male assholes in billionaire romances, SO MANY. My favorite, which sadly I can't remember the title, had a heroine who was just as much of an asshole as the hero and they eventually started directing their assholishness at other people in an attempt to rule the world. If I ever find this book again I'm telling everyone.

Yeah, I mean, how Milan deals with the billionaire thing is pretty interesting! And feels very much of this era and right now -- like, I have no problems believing in Cyclone as a company and their gee-whiz fantastic gizmo smart-devices as the kind of gee-whiz fantastic gizmo smart-devices that are currently being marketed.

Hah, if you ever do find it out, YES PLEASE DO tell everyone because that does sound kind of hilarious.

I was also surprised to find out that I liked this book best, partially because of the family dynamics and partially because - despite the billionaire thing - this felt like the most believable of Milan's books. When Milan writes historical romances, I enjoy the fluff, but I can't forget that she's not working with the real Victorian Era. I mean, I really like Frederica Marshall (The Suffragette Scandal), but, philosophically speaking, she's a fourth-wave feminist of the Tumblr era, not a nineteenth-century suffragette. By contrast, Tina and Blake and their family and friends are actually of their (our) moment in time, and the twenty-first century suits them.

Yeah, the cheerful ahistoricism in Milan's Victorian books doesn't jar me too much, but this book definitely felt much more grounded and believable to me -- which I guess in practice seems to have made it a story I was more involved in and cared about more, whereas with most of her books I'm in it for three hundred pages of fun escapism. (Though, don't get me wrong, I'm all about three hundred pages of fun escapism! AND FREDERICA MARSHALL IS GREAT.)

Haha, "totally not Apple" except that Blake's father is Totally Not Larry Ellison (Oracle's CEO); Cyclone really is built of parts. Also, though I did enjoy the book quite a bit both in its own right and for not being various things with which it could be confused, Tina's mother and father do strike me as typed, if not the types that appear most often in anglophone fiction. (I know Chinese immigrant parents like them, exactly like the father and plus or minus the mother. Multiple people.) It's sort of okay insofar as Blake's father (whose name I have totally forgotten already) also has exactly two notes; it goes with the genre, in other words.

I do love that we see more characters than we need to, strictly speaking, and that they make the book's world hold together better.

And this is my favorite of Milan's books, too.

Yeah, maybe it's just my narrow lens in terms of experience, but I do feel like there's a very specific trope of the Chinese Immigrant Parent you get in anglophone fiction and that Tina's mom, while, like, not not typed, also felt to me like a deliberate avoidance of some of those tropes. And, I dunno, I feel like it's very easy to be one-note with things like "backhand-insult/compliments her kids!" or "doesn't take ADHD medicines seriously!" and get a blanket TERRIBLE PARENT diagnosis, so I appreciated how much that was not the case here.

The one place we didn't get more characters than we needed (and I noticed it) was in Tina and Blake's social circles -- which I can't super complain about, because I liked the family stuff so much and it's not like there was much room for them, but I am kind of curious! Like, does Blake ... have friends ...? Do they notice when suddenly he's never around because he's waiting tables all the time ...?

Friends: perhaps it was cut as distracting? I agree, it was a bit weird to think that Tina has only Maria while Blake has no one at all, though perhaps Blake has primarily the crew who support him and his father at Cyclone (who are suspect only insofar as all of the support team seem to be awesome people). I mean, I was a shy, somewhat ill-fitted Berkeley undergrad who worked much more than played, and I had more than one local friend....

There's even a mention of how Tina has friends who she has difficulty keeping up with socially because of the time/money issues! ... who never appear as soon as the time/money issues are gone. And neither Tina nor Blake seems to be shy or socially awkward so much as they're just preoccupied, so, like, I get that they would not have huge social circles given circumstances, but surely some?

*nods* Though I could also see how Tina would not be all, "SNACKS AND DRINKS ARE ON ME," once she has more time/money, since she knows it's temporary and feels really awkward about it.

Oh, yeah, definitely! I would have kind of liked to see at least a mention of that, though -- even if it was just "....she awkwardly avoided her friends because temporary wealth is weird!" But, again, we already did have lots of characters and a rich cast, so I'm not complaining too much.

Man, this makes me want to reread the book for Research! I loved the concept but it was by far my least favorite of Milan's books. Though now I'm having a hard time remembering what I disliked so much and am wondering if I was just cranky that day or what! But I loved Tina's family and Maria and I wanted, like, five million more percent of them; I'm so excited Maria's getting her own book!!

I'm so confused, I HELLA did not expect this one to be up among my favorites -- I like Regency romance, I'm usually kind of bored by contemporary! (But I've also definitely sort of bounced off Milans that I expected to love before by reading them on the wrong day or at the wrong time; like, I expected to LOVE Violet's book, and then I was like '...it's fine?')

oh my god, I'm still so mad about Violet's book. THAT BOOK WAS NOT WHAT I WAS PROMISED, based on Violet and Sebastian's interactions in Minnie's book!!

THEY WERE SO GREAT IN MINNIE'S BOOK :( :( :(

I loved ALL the parents in this book. Tina's mother was indeed my favorite, but her father made a disproportionate impression in the single scene in which he was featured.

Apparently Blake's father has a POV in the third book, which should be fun. His post-book essay was pretty great. Also, I am 99% sure that his partner was also his romantic partner.

Cyclone felt EXACTLY like a real company. One of my very favorite bits was the whole "It's too bad it doesn't have FIVE-way video conferencing" schtick. I 100% believe that some day, Apple will invent that.

I also loved her dad! I meant to mention him but then I got distracted by how much I loved Tina's mom. >.> I'm looking forward to Blake's dad's POV in book three, too -- I'm guessing Milan is going to have some fun with a more stereotypical apha!male!billionaire!!!

I LOVED THAT BIT. I've seen some reviews complaining about how over-the-top the ending was after a relatively realistic first two hundred pages (but, I mean, that's a relatively realistic that includes life-trading contracts and fake relationships, so??) Anyway, I loved the whole thing, cheesy theatricality and calling in from prison and all.

Oh man, I'm still basically a romance novel newbie but I've watched a few chaebol K-Dramas and that sounds like at least... the same general kind of id appeal. I remember this post that Courtney Milan made which was what first made me interested in picking it up sometime.

Now I'm definitely tossing it onto my to read list!

Edited (what is html) 2015-03-01 13:35 (UTC)

Ha, man, it's TOTALLY like a chaebol kdrama! You know, I haven't actually seen many of them (does Coffee Prince count?), but from what I know of the tropes it definitely feels more in line with that than with western billionaire romance.

I haven't actually seen Coffee Prince (I had a very weird period at the end of high school where I decided I was Too Good For Anime and watched a ton of Japanese dramas instead, but by the time I had gotten to the Korean stuff I had already started moving back to anime... uhhh) but man, that's interesting. I clearly need to read more romance novels, but WHAT IS TIME.

Yeah. Yeeeeeeeeah. Pardon me while I sidestep to avoid being clobbered by my TBR/TBW shelf.

Quite torn between replying to this and starting reading immediately! I'm always anxious when an author starts a new series, but now I don't know why I was holding off. Delighted to have the reassurance! :D

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