Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.
Today’s book recommendation is in a set of romances that take place in the same universe, but it totally works as a standalone (the Out in Hollywood series). This is an adult late-bloomer sapphic romance that takes place in L.A. by the same author who gave us The Summer of Jordi Perez (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles), a young adult book that I also loved. Today’s book recommendation, though, is definitely for adults.
On Her Terms by Amy Spalding
This book is told from the single viewpoint of Clementine Hayes. Clementine works at a boutique entertainment marketing firm in a pretty great work environment in a usually toxic field. Clementine’s boss is really impressed by her work and Clem is working on making a case for expanding her department. Personally, though, she’s been a bit of a wreck since she broke up with her long-term partner, Will. Clementine is around 30 and she and Will had been together since college. Everyone thought they were going to get married, but the sooner it got to Will proposing, the more Clementine realized that everything Will wanted—the straight marriage, the children—was everything Clementine really didn’t want. Also, she wanted to date women and as you can imagine, it was not the most graceful breakup.
This is why, at the start of the book, Clementine is walking to Johnny’s for her first gay bar experience. She gets catcalled on the way there, and a petite, loud woman tells the guys to shove it. The woman, Chloe Lee, then escorts her to the bar and shocks Clementine by telling her that they know each other. They had actually met a number of Clementine’s work holiday parties. Chloe gets the download of Clementine’s situation, and while she’s definitely not interested in dating a newly out queer woman, she’s up for staying in contact, and they exchange numbers.
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Also brewing is a surprise anniversary party for Clementine’s parents, organized by her truly awful brother and her okay-ish sister-in-law. They, like everyone in Clementine’s life, think she made a mistake blowing up her best chance at forever with Will. After a horrible planning session with her brother, Clementine finds a text from Chloe asking to meet up at Johnny’s. She agrees and Chloe has a proposition. Chloe’s friend group (all queer), is all coupled up and according to Chloe, they all act like they pity her or infantilize her because she doesn’t have a solid romantic relationship. There is a wedding coming up in the friend group, and Chloe thinks that she and Clementine should fake date leading up to and through the wedding. In return, Clementine will get some gay dating experience out of it so she can be ready for a real relationship, whatever that means. Clementine thinks it’s an incredibly bad idea but after a bit, she realizes it could help her if Chloe also returned the favor and was her date to her parents’ surprise party.
There is so much comedic mess in this book as well as surprises and I found it a very fun read. Yes, there is definitely explicit, steamy content on the page. Aside from the street harassment the first couple pages, content warnings for negative body image and nonconsensual outing.
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English (US) · 