How to Bang a Billionaire by Alexis Hall

Publication date: April 2017
LGBTQ+ author? Genderqueer
Series: Arden St. Ives Book #1
Setting: Modern day London, Oxford, Scotland
Content warnings: Very explicit and sometimes violent sex

This book is called the gay 50 Shades of Grey. To me the biggest change was not the gender swap. It was that the author understood consent and the very big difference between abuse and BDSM.

This book starts out matching 50 Shades note for note. The billionaire Caspian Hart (Christian Grey) falls in lust with a cute, hapless university student named Arden St. Ives (Anastasia Steele).

The two are drawn to each other but Caspian sensibly keeps his distance until one fateful night where he saves Arden from a drunken non-consensual encounter at a gay bar. He whisks Arden away to safety in a luxury hotel room, where they decide to engage in a time-limited sexual non-relationship. Caspian says they don’t need to sign an NDA, a winking reference to all-encompassing NDA in 50 Shades.

This is where this book starts to deviate from 50 Shades. Sure Caspian is emotionally distant and internally conflicted by his desire for violent sex. But he keeps reminding Arden he has choices and Caspian would never do anything Arden doesn’t want. And Arden is not easily pushed around. When Caspian doesn’t give him what he wants, he asks for it. And when he doesn’t listen, he leaves. (And of course they reconcile, because romance novel.)

In a book that takes great pains to explicitly weave consent throughout, it doesn’t oversimplify things. They have sex that Arden isn’t super into but he doesn’t necessarily oppose. The gray stuff of real sex. But they just sort it out, along with everything else, with varying degrees of emotional maturity.

I almost didn’t review this book because when I started reading it, I was like oh my god this is porn, right? I borrowed it from the library, so I was like do they keep porn in the library now?!? Then I went down a very educational rabbit hole of the difference between porn, erotica and romance.

And as the book went on they did more things together outside of the bedroom and their relationship started to be the focus of the book. It ended on a Happy For Now. So definitely a romance. Just a very spicy romance!

And also, there are so many stories out there that are so very violent, including sexual violence, and those are taken seriously. So why not take this book just as seriously, even though everyone is having a good time!