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I think the release of Courtney Milan's Hold Me officially marks the end of this fall's Sequel Season for me! It was also great timing because the book came out right as I was about to board an 11-hour flight from Europe to San Francisco, while plague-ridden, and having a new Courtney Milan was the only thing that made this experience tolerable.
(Well, that and the fact that my flight was practically empty so I got a whole row to myself. SUCH LUXURY.)
Anyway, Hold Me is the sequel to Trade Me, in which financially-strapped student Tina traded lives with a billionaire student Blake, resulting in romantic hijinks and -- relevantly for Hold Me -- the formation of a household consisting of Tina, Blake, and Tina's roommate Maria, the heroine of this book.
Maria is a trans Latina woman who bonded with Tina over being one of the few non-eighteen-year-olds in their undergraduate class, and who has spent the last several years writing an increasingly popular blog featuring various apocalyptic scenarios built on statistical math projections. Her current problems include:
- the fact that sharing a household with a couple who just had a whole romance novel feels a lot less comfortable than sharing a household with just her buddy Tina
- the oncoming fact of graduation and resultant need to get a sensible job as an actuary, and possibly spend less time blogging
- relatedly, an ongoing ambiguous flirtation with a long-time commenter on her blog that is taking up a lot of time and attention that she should probably be using to research sensible actuary jobs
- the fact that she keeps bumping into her brother's new bestie Jay, an asshole with a lot of unexamined assumptions about makeup/fashion/visible femininity and how those things don't go together with intelligence or scientific achievement
Physicist Jay na Thalang is, of course, both the long-time blog commenter and the romantic lead of the story, because this is an unabashed Shop Around The Corner trope with no bones about it. His problems include the unexamined sexism and a host of familiar academic woes of the 21st century (imposter syndrome, grant-writing, job instability, the dream of tenure....)
Jay also, for the record, has a tragic backstory involving suicide of a loved one and resultant family complications which didn't ... not feel real or integrated? ... but did feel like it got possibly a too-snappy resolution -- I liked both Jay and Maria's families, but I think overall Trade Me did a much better job of making me invested in the protagonist's parents/relatives and integrating them into the plot; it was one of that book's great strengths. (Tina's mom is still my favorite.) I would've liked to see more of Maria's brother and grandmother, especially. That said, I loved Maria and the loving detail poured into her nerdy math-science-apocalypse blog TREMENDOUSLY, and I like Shop Around the Corner tropes, and all the university/college/grad school stuff felt extremely well-drawn to me; overall this continues to be one of my favorite Milan series.
(Well, that and the fact that my flight was practically empty so I got a whole row to myself. SUCH LUXURY.)
Anyway, Hold Me is the sequel to Trade Me, in which financially-strapped student Tina traded lives with a billionaire student Blake, resulting in romantic hijinks and -- relevantly for Hold Me -- the formation of a household consisting of Tina, Blake, and Tina's roommate Maria, the heroine of this book.
Maria is a trans Latina woman who bonded with Tina over being one of the few non-eighteen-year-olds in their undergraduate class, and who has spent the last several years writing an increasingly popular blog featuring various apocalyptic scenarios built on statistical math projections. Her current problems include:
- the fact that sharing a household with a couple who just had a whole romance novel feels a lot less comfortable than sharing a household with just her buddy Tina
- the oncoming fact of graduation and resultant need to get a sensible job as an actuary, and possibly spend less time blogging
- relatedly, an ongoing ambiguous flirtation with a long-time commenter on her blog that is taking up a lot of time and attention that she should probably be using to research sensible actuary jobs
- the fact that she keeps bumping into her brother's new bestie Jay, an asshole with a lot of unexamined assumptions about makeup/fashion/visible femininity and how those things don't go together with intelligence or scientific achievement
Physicist Jay na Thalang is, of course, both the long-time blog commenter and the romantic lead of the story, because this is an unabashed Shop Around The Corner trope with no bones about it. His problems include the unexamined sexism and a host of familiar academic woes of the 21st century (imposter syndrome, grant-writing, job instability, the dream of tenure....)
Jay also, for the record, has a tragic backstory involving suicide of a loved one and resultant family complications which didn't ... not feel real or integrated? ... but did feel like it got possibly a too-snappy resolution -- I liked both Jay and Maria's families, but I think overall Trade Me did a much better job of making me invested in the protagonist's parents/relatives and integrating them into the plot; it was one of that book's great strengths. (Tina's mom is still my favorite.) I would've liked to see more of Maria's brother and grandmother, especially. That said, I loved Maria and the loving detail poured into her nerdy math-science-apocalypse blog TREMENDOUSLY, and I like Shop Around the Corner tropes, and all the university/college/grad school stuff felt extremely well-drawn to me; overall this continues to be one of my favorite Milan series.