UGH to recap my mid-book status update: what a FANTASTIC book-as-advertisement for the importance of comprehensive sex education in schools that focuses on both the benefits of long term reversible contraception as well as what healthy, mutually fulfilling sexual relationships look like! If Margo as a character wasn’t amusing and so forthright with her personal failings I’d have thrown this book at a wall.
I’ll note that my review isn’t because I disliked the plot, even though I am explicitly on the record as disliking Pregnancy Narratives, especially (PARTICULARLY) when those stories are of Unexpected pregnancies that, by their very nature, are Highly Disruptive to a the pregnant person’s future. I’m not saying it’s unrealistic–indeed, pregnancy is highly chaotic and puts a wrench in the lives of many people, that’s why we need to provide adequate care for new parents and their children–but it feels like a cheap shot in many stories where a baby serves as a trope to get our main characters together or force one character (usually a woman) to depend on another.
This that is not.
Margo decides to keep the kid, in her own words, because she didn’t want to be forced to not? And because, yeah, she didn’t think it would have been as hard as it was. Because she’s 19, and she was taken advantage of by her much-older, wealthy, married professor. All of which is ick and neatly disposed of in the first section of the book. Most of it is concerned with how a young, relatively uneducated mother can support herself and her child in a state of health and dignity, and how there aren’t really neat answers. Enter, OnlyFans and the bulk of the plot, which centers on how Margo learns the ropes and gains agency (and creative satisfaction) through her work.
The star rating is really because, for how short this book it is certain has an axe to grind and not much room to do it in. The legitimacy of sex work, the impact sex work has on one’s sense of self, the inadequacy of support services for single parents, housing unaffordability, CPS, wealth inequality, etc etc–it’s a lot, and by the end it does feel a bit like a check box for Thorpe to make the case for a progressive future in which sex work is work but also if you wanted to do other things they’d pay enough to support a child. The ultimate solution also becomes a bit too tidy, adding to the sense that there was more messaging but not enough plot to sustain it.