I have friends, PattyKates, who write fabulous romance reviews as a team. They coined the term “raisin sex” to describe sexual activity in novels that is simply not to one’s taste, i.e. when your cookie has raisins in it, but you prefer chocolate chips. Man Candy was just such a book for me. A contemporary romance with some charm, flashes of humour, and a fairly paint by numbers story delivery, Harlow delivered raisin sex when I wanted chocolate chip sex.  Raisin sex, I might add, is in a lot of books these days. I can’t tell if that’s the influence of Fifty Shades or my immersion in the genre came at a time when such things became more mainstream.

Quinn and Jamie have known each other all their lives. She crushed on him in high school and was rebuffed. After a career as a model, he has just moved back to their hometown, specifically the lower half of her duplex. He’s hot AF, as the story lovingly tells us over and over again, and he’s also really into Jamie, but she only wants to hook up. Embarking on a strictly sexual relationship based on compatible proclivities, he wants more. Jamie is jaded and unconvinced. He’s pretty much perfect and she knows he’s a good guy since he’s a close friend of her brother’s. Quinn slowly wears her down by loving her up and waiting for her to surrender to the inevitable.

While nothing special, there was enough fun in the writing style to keep me mostly interested, but the raisin sex disrupted the flow. Unlike some abominations or awful novels, Man Candy wasn’t that out there in terms of the sex scenes, just some shaming and domination, but it made me uncomfortable.  Any intimate contact which smacks of belittlement or pleasure in humiliation or pain really puts me off. Not just preferring chocolate chips over raisins, I also want vanilla.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful or my  streamlined recommendations list.

The Afterward contains an interview with the cover model (above ) Quinn was based on.

Tagged: book review, contemporary romance, Melanie Harlow, romance review