The Daddy Arrangement — Jesse H. Reign
Situationship #3 — 3 stars
The premise has everything going for it on paper: Elliot is a party boy with a spending problem who ends up living with Stuart, his dad’s best friend, a man old enough to be his father and pedantic enough to drive him up the wall. Stuart takes one look at Elliot’s chaos and decides he’s the man to fix it. An arrangement forms. Feelings follow. Classic.
The execution, for me personally, just didn’t land.
I’ll be honest: I skimmed a significant portion of this one. The dynamic between Elliot and Stuart never quite grabbed me the way I needed it to, and once I’d lost the thread I was mostly reading to see how it resolved rather than because I couldn’t put it down. The Daddy/boy energy is present and fans of Jesse H. Reign’s style will likely enjoy it much more than I did — plenty of other readers clearly loved this book, so this is very much a personal miss rather than a verdict on the writing.
What I can say with confidence is that there is one scene that is burned into my memory, and not in a good way. The moment when Stuart has to tell his best friend — Elliot’s father — that he’s in a relationship with his son is one of the most spectacularly awkward things I have ever read in an MM romance. Cringe doesn’t cover it. I had to put the book down. I respect the author for actually writing the scene instead of skipping past it, but it was genuinely difficult to get through.
If you’re already a fan of the Situationship series and dad’s-best-friend is your trope, go for it — you’ll probably rate this higher than I did. Just know that scene is coming and brace yourself.