Review: Pretty in Pink by Jay Northcote

Title: Pretty in Pink

Series: Housemates: Book Six

Author: Jay Northcote

Length: 211 Pages

Category: Contemporary

At a Glance: It truly pains me to say that Pretty in Pink was mostly a miss for me. My issue with this book isn’t that there’s sex in the plot. It’s that sex is the plot, which left me feeling pretty ambivalent towards the characters and their future.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Ryan isn’t looking for a relationship with a guy–and Johnny isn’t looking for a relationship at all.

Ryan’s always been attracted to tall, leggy blondes–normally of the female variety. When Johnny catches his eye at a party, Ryan’s interest is piqued even though he’s never been with a guy before. The attraction is mutual, and the amazing night that follows opens Ryan’s eyes to his bisexuality.

Experience has taught Johnny that love hurts. Staying single is safer, and there’s no need for complicated relationships when hooking up is easy. When he moves in next door to Ryan, they’re both interested in picking up where they left off, and it seems like an ideal arrangement: convenient, mutually satisfying, and with no strings attached.

Despite their best intentions to keep things casual, they develop an emotional connection alongside the physical one. Both begin to want more from the relationship but are afraid to admit it. If they’re going to work things out, they need to start being honest–first with themselves, and then with each other.

Although this book is part of the Housemates series, it has new main characters, a satisfying happy ending, and can be read as a standalone.

Review: Johnny is ready and willing to be Ryan’s experimental phase. He’s pretty as well as sex positive, and the one-offs he prefers hides a past hurt which happened four years before the story begins and is relatively vague on details but is the root cause of him walling off his heart and rejecting the idea of anything resembling an emotional connection. Johnny doesn’t do relationships, so why not have a little fun with a hot guy—who happens to be sexually conflicted?

Ryan is probably not as straight as he’s always believed he is. He thinks Johnny is gorgeous, which he’s okay admitting to himself. The much more difficult admission is that he’s attracted to and completely turned on by Johnny, so turned on, in fact, that going home with him for a one-off to put all his conflicted thoughts and feelings to rest seems like a good idea at the time. And so, match struck, fuse lit, wait for it all to blow up in their faces. Which, unsurprisingly, it does.

And, that’s the plot laid out in two paragraphs.

Pretty in Pink is the most erotic book I’ve read yet by this author, at least as far as I can recall. The novel is made up of a collection of sex scenes mingled with some internal conflict, which served as a sticking point for me. I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat myself: if I can’t remove the sex scenes from a book and still be left with a little heft to the storyline along with some solid character/relationship development outside of the bedroom, that book was not written for my consumption. I did, however, appreciate some of the introspective moments both Johnny and Ryan shared with their respective friends and housemates. They do have a meaningful conversation or two along the way, just not with each other, and while some of my frustration with that can be blamed on my love of communication over the Big Misunderstanding used as an angstigator (instigator of angst, add it to the vocab), the overriding result is manufactured drama which could have been cleared up in a sentence or two directed to each other at the right moment.

Ryan’s conflict is entirely internalized and self-created—no homophobic friends or demonized parents play a role in his inability to come to terms with his sexuality, and I appreciated that insight. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Johnny’s fears are rooted in his having been burned before. His mistake is his assuming that the pact he’d made with Ryan—to have mind-blowing sex with someone who’s convenient—wouldn’t lay waste to his defenses. And then it ends up doing exactly that. It doesn’t take much precognition to see what’s going to happen when meaningless sex crosses blurred lines into attachment issues for both of them, which happened despite them swearing it wouldn’t.

Ultimately, so much of the gratification of reading is owed to what we’re each looking for in a book and what we want to get out of it, which is why it’s not always about what an author has written but about what each reader hopes to take away from a story. I’ve enjoyed each and every one of the books in the Housemates series, so it truly pains me to say that Pretty in Pink was mostly a miss for me. My issue with this book isn’t that there’s sex in the plot. It’s that sex is the plot, which left me feeling pretty ambivalent towards the characters and their future. This book wasn’t for me, obviously, but I will say that it’s left at the best possible resolution, without a tidy and manipulated happily-ever-after, and that I appreciated since we didn’t get the opportunity to see a promising relationship built before the end.

You can buy Pretty in Pink here:
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