Trade Me

Tina Chen immigrated to San Fransisco from China with her parents when she was six, and now she's working through college, determined to become a doctor so her parents will never have to think about money again. Blake Reynolds is the son of the billionaire head of a major tech company, and he is suffocating under his father's expectations that he will give up college and take over the company. When they end up in a heated disagreement about social safety nets in a class, Tina says Blake wouldn't last two weeks in her shoes. Blake later suggests that they change places for the rest of the semester, mostly because he hopes it will serve as an escape for him. They do. Then there are feelings.

I loved this book. Both of the main characters show more feel vibrant and real on the page, I wanted to know what would happen to them, and I felt pulled into their world. All that was wonderful--and pretty much a set of prerequisites for liking a romance novel-- but Trade Me surprised me at every turn. It rings so many of my "yay! diverse humans and diverse human situations" bells (poc heroine, hero with an eating disorder, transgender minor character (who will be the heroine of book two, yay!), a minor character whose domestic situation reads potentially non-heteronormative), and the treatment of the class and economic issues that arise between Tina and Blake are handled well. The realities of Tina's poverty feel accurate and scary, and her fears about becoming distracted by Blake are sharply realized. Both Tina and Blake love their parents deeply but have significant issues with them, and the resolutions to those plot threads are extremely affecting.

The book is not perfect--there's maybe a bit of hand-waving about some of the principles' concerns about being in a relationship in the end, though things feel emotionally wrapped up and the hand-waving can maybe be excused by the constraints of the genre (got to get to the HEA), especially since we're likely to see some of their relationship again in subsequent books. I also thought it was a little odd that we didn't see more of Tina in Blake's lavish apartment when they switched places. Some more details about how that felt (weird? luxurious? bizarre?) would have been great. But Trade Me was a solid, affecting, satisfying read. Recommended. show less

Trade Me is the first novel in the Cyclone series by Courtney Milan.

Plot:
Tina Chen just wants to get her degree, so she can support her family properly and never have to worry about money again. Unfortunately, Blake Reynolds is also in her class, billionaire son of Cyclone Technologies. And when he makes some comments about being poor that drip with his privilege, Tina just can’t stick to her usual routine of keeping her head down. She calls him out and tells him that he couldn’t survive a month in her life. To her surprise, Blake approaches her later and proposes just such a change: he will live in her shoes for a while and she in his. It is too good an opportunity for Tina to make some extra money to pass it up, but it soon turns show more out that trading lives without getting close to each other is impossible.

After the entire thing with Milan and the RWA, I wanted to show my support for her by buying one of her books, and since I’m not much into historical romance, there weren’t that many options for me from her works. So I picked up Trade Me although I had my concerns about the premise. Would this turn into a “poor rich people have it hard, too” thing? I am glad to say that my concerns were completely unnecessary – Trade Me knows what it’s about politically, it’s a fun read and I very much liked Tina and Blake.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2020/07/31/trade-me-courtney-milan/ show less

Unusually for me, I enjoyed this contemporary romance—thanks, recommenders! Blake is a tormented billionaire software genius, and Tina Chen is a poor student who lives on almost nothing in order to send money back home so that the lights stay on and her sister gets her medicine, while her mother spends her time fighting for asylum applicants. After a classroom confrontation gets personal, Blake offers Tina a chance to swap lives, as a way to get away from the pressures of his own life. Tina agrees, because the money is so good (the confrontation she has about this with Blake’s overbearing father, about how money is life for her and her family just as he values his company as more than just a pile of cash, is one of the book’s show more highlights), but then her attraction to Blake complicates matters considerably. Tina is smart and driven and Blake never tries to manipulate her; he is very much in the Mad Max/Raleigh Becket/Peter Bishop model of “guy who stares adoringly at woman he has correctly identified as amazing.” Their dialogue was good and I felt the attraction between them. Content warning for disordered eating/exercise. show less

I know a guy who is a cooking laurel in the SCA. He likes to describe how one of his recipes made someone approach him angrily after the feast, complaining, "You made me like turnips."

I rarely read contemporary real world fiction of any kind. Only for Courtney Milan would I read contemporary, New Adult, billionaire romance. Only Courtney Milan could make me like it.

Blake is the heir of a tech company, under pressure from his father to leave college and return to take control of it. Tina is a poor student trying desperately to make ends meet and pay her parents' bills. Blake proposes a swap until the end of the semester. Unknown to anybody, Blake is also dealing with other spoilery problems.

This is a Courtney Milan book, which means that show more Blake is pretty much the opposite of an alpha jerkwad and that the whole thing is as nerdy as a D&D game on the Starship Enterprise. There is dirty talk about SEC regulations. There is an extended metaphor about what it would have been like if Darth Vader had raised Luke from birth and put him above anything else in the Empire. There are intriguing side characters, particularly Blake's good-dad-Vader father and Tina's Chinese immigrant parents, whom I hope we'll get glimpses of in future entries in the series.

The logistics of the whole swap are handled extremely well, with full acknowledgement that they can never really trade lives because they each still came from a larger context. (If there is a flaw in this book, it's that this was acknowledged explicitly maybe one too many times.) This book is as funny and as touching as anything that Milan has written, and although I'm looking forward to her next historical, I'll be looking forward to the next book in this series, too. show less

You know my blog, you know that the number of NA books I've read and enjoyed in recent years I can count on the fingers of one hand. Well, this is one of them.

When I saw that Courtney Milan, one of the goddesses of historical romance wrote a contemporary romance, and new adult at that? I was intrigued and scared. Intrigued to see what her talented fingers can do with a genre I don't like that much, scared that she'll miss her audience. That the fans of HR won't go for Trade Me, and that the fans of NA won't get her peculiar style.

I think she'll do just fine *smirks*



True to herself Milan created a spellbinding story out of the cliched, done to death elements. And damn... just damn! This was sooo good, down-to-earth, honest and show more heartwarming, I choked back tears when I finished Trade Me.

Tina Chen is a poor as a church mouse student who struggles to keep up with her increasingly complex studies and make enough money to help her activist mother pay the bills. So when a golden boy, son of a very rich CEO, Blake Reynolds gives his take on food stamps and poverty issues at one of their mutual lectures, she can't hold back her fury anymore. She tells him that he doesn't know sh*t and that he wont' last in her life two weeks.

Blake is running. From his dad and the huge responsibilities hoisted on him, from his own problems and from the feeling of being suffocated by Cyclone Industries. So he takes a sabbatical and goes to the university and avoids his increasingly insistent dad until a furious Chinese girl whom he's been secretly admiring tells him he is full of crap and gives him an idea of a further escape.

They will trade places, apartments and responsibilities, and maybe he'll be able to breathe more freely after all this is finished. However, the more Tina and Blake get to know each other the more they realise that their worries and their families are not that different. And while there is a wild spark between them which slowly turns into a genuine affection and warmth, both are terrified of taking it further until they vanquish their deep-rooted fears.

There is so much yummy goodness here, peeps. Rich characters (Tina simply kicks ass with her "I take no nonsense" attitude), wonderful, supporting, colourful families, the dialogues to die for no matter who talks to whom... and the social and personal growth issues touched upon by the author are huge.I was feeling like a pig in a mud wallow, I wanted to just fall into it and roll all over. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful.

Please, read it! This will be one of the best reads of the year for me, and I can't wait to read the next book in this series. Highly recommended.

"Love is never safe," [...] "It's weird, it's magical. It's the moment when you break through the dark shell that protects your heart and say, this, this person. I'm going to let this person in, let him come so close that he can hurt me more than I can possibly imagine. I am going to let him hurt me." [...] inhales. "Love is never safe." show less

Trade Me is a complex contemporary romance that balances themes of poverty, parental pressure, and mental illness. It suffers from some pacing issues at the end, but I loved Tina and Blake enough that I hardly noticed. Milan speaks to the experience of being poor in a way I don't often read, something that really resonated with me personally. The story also touches on immigration law and the assumptions we make about other people. On a lighter note, Milan's love of gadgets is evident in her descriptions of Cyclone's tech. Source: Audible Romance Package

CW: drug use, disordered eating.

I'm not a big fan of billionaire novels, because I find conspicuous consumption and rescue narratives a turn-off. But this is a Courtney Milan billionaire novel so I couldn't wait to see what she did with it.

And I loved it.

The trouble is, the things I especially loved are basically spoilers, which makes it hard to talk about how much I loved it, but I'll do my best.

It's a trading-places novel, where Blake, the heir to a huge tech company swaps his life with that of Tina, a poor immigrant fellow student. Unlike the film, he isn't doing it for laughs and she insists they make a proper agreement, and they become friends and eventually a romance happens. The novel isn't very fond of the "rich man rescues poor woman from poverty" show more narrative, and Tina isn't passive or a victim or stupid, and Blake is a rich boy with a problem, but not a manpainy woobie.

So you have Blake washing dishes to pay rent on Tina's horrible bedsit and trying to figure out his problem, and Tina planning the new top-secret product launch and worrying about her family. (And the actual tech product launch scene, very near the end of the book, is brilliant and funny and spot on, and also very emotional and romantic.) There are lovely minor characters, and people feel believable, and there isn't any minor character being one-dimensionally horrible to provide artificial conflict, and the ending is great and doesn't tie everything up happily ever after.

I'm really glad there are two more books in this series, and I am particularly excited for book 2 and the characters it's apparently going to focus on. I also want to see more about how Tina and Blake and their families go on from where they've got to at the end of this book.

Two other things of note:

1. There is a trans character, who just happens to be trans, i.e. their status only gets mentioned as a background thing to explain a particular response to a conversation, and they have way more lines/scenes that aren't about their being trans. I can't remember ever reading something like that outside of fanfic, and it's great to see.

2. There is extensive portrayal of an eating disorder. I think it's a portrayal done well, but it's unavoidably there in the story, if you are the sort of person to find that triggering.

(this is a slightly revised verson of the review originally posted on my blog at http://rmc28.dreamwidth.org/565003.html) show less