Knocked up by my billionaire boss, by Scarlett Sawyer is a 124-page contemporary romance novel. It is written from a first-person POV, two-sided.

I give this book a 2/5.

So, why two out of five? I have mixed feelings. It depends on the type of reader you are. I prefer my books to have a good character development where the character has a lie they believe in and by the end, that lie changes and what they wanted has changed to what they really needed to help destroy the lie.

Yeah, i know, that’s a long sentence. Why don’t we get into the heart of the story.

*Spoilers*
I don’t love secret baby tropes. Especially the ones where the heroine kept the baby, now a teenager a secret. That sort of pisses me off. As a parent myself, purposely keeping the growth of your child away from the other half of their DNA is unacceptable. Obviously, if the man is terrible or something that’s fine, but if the heroine is going to end up with the guy at the end of the book than he wasn’t that bad, now was he? Anyway, there’s a lot of nuances around what I do and don’t like about the trope.

Let’s talk about the story. You have Lilah who is a virgin. You don’t really get to know about her quirks as a character as the character arcs are pretty shallow in this book. You do know she is a hard working journalist who works hard at her father’s magazine. I wasn’t able to identify anything for her to overcome. The story starts off with Lilah working late (as usual) to get an article done so she wasn’t able to hang out with her boyfriend after work. But, lucky her, she finished early so she leaves work to head to the bar. She sees him grinding up on some other girl and being super physically inappropriate, so she leaves and…this is the part that didn’t make sense…checks into a hotel. It isn’t like she and the other guy were living together, so not sure why she checked into a hotel over the weekend? At the hotel bar is where she spots James.

James is there doing his “playboy” thing where he’s just trying to pick up some chick and decides to go to his room to grab something and runs into Lilah. They ride the elevator together and it breaks down…and that is the start of their illicit romance. I’m kidding, there was nothing illicit about it. You later find out that James bought Lilah’s father’s magazine and was supposed to turn it around because it was in the red.

General Thoughts:

1. The characters were flat, they didn’t seem to have any internal conflict they were dealing with. They didn’t change at all
2. The heroine was a little too stupid to live. She was shocked or surprised she was pregnant when they were doing it for two months with zero protection.
3. This book was 80% tell so you never got to see how or why the characters felt certain ways
4. You never got a sense for why these two even belonged together. There was a lot of “She’s so smart” but why? She hasn’t done anything to prove it. “He’s so different” from what? What was her past belief?
5. It doesn’t matter to me if the author doesn’t live in the city they’re writing about, but it isn’t hard to do a cursory research on the locations. The setting was in Los Angeles, California (LA, CA). These are some things that drove me crazy:
   1. James said, he hates how humid LA is compared to New York. Here’s the thing, NYC is humid AF in the summer. Like, unbearably so. As in, you step outside and you feel like you just took a disgusting shower with a thousand people spitting on you. LA, like most cities on the west coast is not humid
   2. James says he hates LA, and yet has a condo in Hollywood for some reason? And in the end of the book offers to get a condo in LA to be with Lilah (or whatever)
   3. The author had the two characters take a plane to Hollywood…from LA. For those of you not familiar with the geography of California, Hollywood is in LA. It is actually a neighborhood in LA. Again, don’t care if you’ve never lived in the place you write about, or maybe you’ve never been, fine. Do some research.
6. Settings were not always clear.
7. Sex scenes were okay