Faking with Benefits

This is a poly romantic comedy and it really worked for me. 

The premise is that Layla is nearing 30 and successful in all areas of her life except her love life. She loves a list and plans everything to the nth degree but is worried so won't tick of the last item on her ten-year plan before she's 30 – getting married. 

Her good friends in the flat opposite are Josh, Zack and Luke – hot single guys who host a dating advice podcast. After Layla airs her woes to them after a disastrous date (he tried to climb out the loo window between the starter and the main course), they all land on the ingenious plan to simultaneously fake date Layla to see where she's going wrong, let her ‘practice' and produce some fresh new content for their podcast. 

Surprise, surprise, they all catch feelings, as well as get very horny. There's no angst surrounding the non-monogamy element here as the three guys have been in a polyamorous relationship with each other before (there are no romantic or sexual interactions between the men). Layla is very much ok with this. The wider world, is not so ok with this. 

It is very smutty, and it doesn't make you wait until right until the end before heating up. I like my smutty fiction with plot and this novel delivers on that – we have plot, and we have character growth as well as lots of sex. 

One thing that did distract me from my enjoyment of the novel was the confusing sense of it being not-quite British but not-quite American. I looked the author up and it turns out that although she lives in the UK now, she is not British by origin, which I think probably explains that. I think most people who have grown up not in the USA with a huge amount of US media exposure growing up are quite adept at understanding the sort of cultural differences between the things we are shown and translating various words and phrases. As such, I feel completely comfortable reading or watching media set in the US, I feel I've grown up with enough exposure and context to feel I can understand most of all nuances there. And there are definitely things that were once purely Americanisms that have become commonplace or unremarkable in the UK over the years – proms, calling secondary school ‘high school' (although it was always high school in my county as we had middle schools in the past, most of the UK didn't... anyway that's a tangent). But this novel did have a lot of Americanisms cropping up in a narrative that was supposedly from the perspective of British characters and otherwise did a very good job of writing them believably. Which I think is why they were so jarring. One example is a reference to getting “dress coded” which is a phrase I've only ever encountered in American media. Not that kids in the UK don't get in trouble for not complying with the uniform policy, but I've never heard anyone refer to it as getting dress coded. But I left school longer ago than I like to think about so maybe they do now?