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A review by lezreadalot
Just Business by Anna Zabo
3.0
There wasn't much left in him but love. Love and hope. That's what remained.
This was okay. It came pretty close to being a complete miss for me, but luckily it pulled back from that edge in the end. It's an office romance between a CFO and a new employee, and it deals heavily with both these men's past traumas, and it's also a BDSM romance. The first two things on that list are great, but the last... eh. I'm so very picky about BDSM stuff, it would probably be better if I avoided it, because it seldom works very well for me, and I often end up bored. This couple was cute but I didn't feel their chemistry much, and the relationship felt like it moved at lightning speed, and that wasn't very satisfying. I might have felt that way because the book did the thing where it would do little micro timeskips of a few weeks, and then tell us that the characters have been dating during that time, and getting closer, etc. It just didn't feel organic.
My least favourite thing was the conflict, and how very very manufactured it felt. Not that it wasn't understandable; they both have a lot of past trauma, and Justin's has to do with abuse, and he never dealt with that trauma properly, so it's not unthinkable that he'd have reacted the way he did in that situation. But everything about the way it was written felt so forced. Justin admits to himself that Eli doesn't have the characteristics of his abuser, but then goes into this circular argument in his head and convinces himself that actually yeah Eli is just like his abuser. It just felt like the author needed to slot in the conflict, and did so in the clumsiest way possible. It did lead to some good conversations down the line, but I never really recovered from my annoyance at that. But the last third of the book had a lot of cute moments, and heartfelt moments, and I really felt for both of them. I also really enjoyed how much emphasis Eli put on reciprocity and sharing control.
Listened to the audiobook as read by Iggy Toma, who is always great to listen to. Somehow, I always find that I like his voices for side characters more than I like his main character voices, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this. This was overall really good, even though it didn't land super well for me.
Content warnings: