Satisfaction Guaranteed
Karelia Stetz-Waters
Cade never expected to inherit anything from her family – it’s not like she’s ever fitted in and she’s always privately thought that she must have been adopted. Serena on the other hand hasn’t been able to plan for the future after her last falling-out left her with nothing. Thrown together to try to save a sinking sex toy store, will Cade and Serena be able to save the shop, their sex and their lives?
Cade and Serena are great examples of characters that some people will recognise themselves in (I graviated towards Cade) and others may think are just too stereotypical. The good news is that you don’t have to like them both to enjoy the novel! You also don’t need to like sex toys (it’s perfectly ok if you don’t like or need sex) or art to appreciate the novel.
Karelia and her publisher kindly provided me with a eBook copy – which I promptly failed to review (darn, I hate eBooks). I then waited patiently until my physical copy arrived in the mail, and then began reading it aloud to the other two lesbians in my household. Unfortunately, I was really REALLY invested in the story again, and so I wanted to read ahead of them. So… I finished it without them. My copy is actually looking a little beaten up, which I guess shows how much I love it.
I then wrote a review… and WordPress ate it! Grah! I’m back again now considering my third re-read because I loved it so much. I thought it was much better than the previous novel in this ‘series’ which was Worth the Wait. I’m now waiting impatiently for the next book, Behind the Scenes. If you’re a person who identifies as queer, know someone who identifies as queer (which is surely just about everyone?) – this author is for you.
I passionately recommend all of Karelia’s novels to the Queers in your life. Karelia writes a really enjoyable romance style where the sex is a bonus rather than expected. I find that most of her characters come alive for me, and even though I know what the ending will be, I still feel certain that I might be tricked and there won’t be a happily ever after.
It’s nice to have a character with a chronic illness that makes it difficult for her to be a main character! It’s very unfair and biased that many heroes are strong or even just plain healthy when the reality is that many people live with unseen conditions. Spoons! So in a way that almost made this book redeemable, but not quite.
Aw, how cute! I liked this novel because the main character was fat, and didn’t care, and was a lesbian, and didn’t care. She even had the freedom to do that! But she definitely fell into the category that she still wanted to hide some of her identity. The author didn’t harp on about her being queer or anything, which was quite refreshing. I did however feel frustrated with how stupid Cass was sometimes. I’m really not sure how you can get from being a B student to a D in the space of a term without twigging that there’s something wrong…
Is the title long enough? The timeline in this and the in-brackets asides made this novel not really work for me. I had trouble keeping track of whose perspective I was reading, and so I didn’t really follow who didn’t like who or not? This, combined with essentially flashbacks, made it very tricky for me to follow. Ultimately it didn’t really matter though, because it’s pretty obvious how this novel is going to end. It wouldn’t be YA if it didn’t have a happy ending!
I didn’t feel gripped by this novel. I picked up and finished a couple of non-fiction books concurrently with this one because I wasn’t drawn to Felix. The way that Felix didn’t seem to see love when he was looking for it felt true to me. I felt a little blindsided though by the ending, because I didn’t see how Felix could be so oblivious. I don’t see why a poly relationship couldn’t have worked as well.
I liked Sean! Poor guy. Honestly the title and the cover made me feel a bit worried about hating it, but I empathised with Sean quite well. I was the same as Sean when Australia decided to waste money on whether we should let gay people marry or not. There’s plenty of perspectives to choose from here, and the author has done a great job of illuminating just some of the problematic attitudes in Australia. I hope we’ve come a lot further than 2017, but I’m honestly not sure.
What was good about this novel was the internal anguish of Milo trying to reconcile his homosexuality and his religious beliefs. It’s impressive how much internalised homophobia Milo had even after a single summer of feeling feelings for the wrong gender. Milo is very distressed, but also an idiot.
I was so invested in Georgina, and she felt like a real character with some interesting flaws. Most of the time I found myself genuinely laughing, rather than thking ‘what an idiot’. Let me say though that perhaps the reason I understood how Georgina treated her friends is because I viewed her through a lens of trauma. Georgina just doesn’t seem to have processed her own father’s death. Thus, her relationships and the horrible way she treats her family and friends is, if not justified, certainly understandable.
I unfortunately found this novel quite cringeworthy, and I struggled to keep reading it. I knew from the beginning that things weren’t going to go well for Noah! Was I ever so stupid in highschool?
This novel was phenomenal, and I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve just finished reading it and I’m still having happy thoughts and feeling a warm cuddliness towards the characters. I loved Patch, I loved Evie and I loved Edwin. I even loved Abigail just a slight bit too – even if when her motivation came out it didn’t actually make sense with the time chronology of the novel. I read an ARC, so maybe that’s been ironed out by the time this review goes live.