Working Out the Kinks — Misha Horne 3.5 stars
Mistakes aren’t supposed to feel this good…
Landon grew up watching his mother con her way through rich men — marrying, emptying bank accounts, and moving on without looking back. She was good at it. The lesson Lan took from watching her: don’t want things, don’t take help, and never get involved with anyone who has more money than you. He’s been living by those rules ever since. Scraping by as a dive bar musician, keeping everyone at arm’s length, eating as little as possible and spending even less, and calling all of it freedom. It’s not a great life by most standards, but it’s his, and that’s the point.
Then Brett walks back into it.
They were stepbrothers for about a year and a half in high school — back when Lan’s mother landed Brett’s father and briefly installed them all under the same roof. Back then, Lan dismissed Brett as a spoiled rich kid and a royal pain in his side. Ten years later, Brett tracks him down at the bar where his band is playing, and he’s still spoiled, still a pain, still richer than anyone Lan wants anything to do with. Except now he’s gorgeous, and he wants Lan — specifically, he wants Lan to take control, set limits, and give him exactly the discipline he’s been craving. Mostly in the form of spankings.
This is the setup, and on paper it’s everything. Ex-stepbrothers, class differences, a brat who needs someone to handle him, a grumpy working-class musician who has no idea what he’s walking into. The bones of this book are great. Misha Horne is also genuinely a good writer — the prose is clean, the banter between Lan and Brett is sharp and funny, and there are moments in this book that are quietly devastating in the best way. When it works, it really works.
The problem is Landon.
The whole time I was reading, I kept thinking of that Eminem lyric: why are you so mad? Because Lan spends roughly 98% of this book being furious at everything — at Brett, at himself, at the idea of wanting something, at the idea of being happy, at the general concept of good things existing in his life. He’s mean, he’s exhausting, and there were long stretches where I felt genuinely bad for Brett and couldn’t figure out why he was so devoted to someone who treated him like a recurring inconvenience. At one point Lan literally tells Brett there’s no reason to love him. Brett agrees that there isn’t. I started questioning Brett’s sanity.
What makes this harder is that this is entirely Landon’s POV — we never get inside Brett’s head, which means his relentless devotion reads as more baffling than romantic for a long stretch of the book. You can see that Brett is perceptive, that he understands Lan in ways Lan doesn’t understand himself, that his pushiness comes from somewhere real and not just entitlement — but you have to piece that together yourself because the narrative never lets you inside him. A lot of other reviewers felt the same way. Brett needed more page space to breathe as a character, and the single POV choice, while understandable, costs the book something.
What it also costs the book is pacing. The internal monologue is a lot. Lan processes everything at length — sometimes illuminatingly, sometimes in circles — and the book is 367 pages, which is probably fifty pages longer than it needed to be. If you’re someone who DNFs when a character repeats the same internal argument for the fourth time, this might not make it to your finished shelf. Several Goodreads reviewers bailed around the 25-35% mark for exactly that reason, and I understand why.
This isn’t heavy BDSM. There’s spanking, there’s some dirty talk, there’s dominance. Brett doesn’t just want to be spanked; he wants someone who cares enough about his behavior to correct it. Lan doesn’t want control for its own sake; he wants to feel needed, to matter to someone, to have a purpose that isn’t just survival. The kink is the language they use to get there, and that’s a more interesting story than pure heat would have been. Lan’s discovery of that dynamic felt real in a way that a lot of kink-focused romance doesn’t bother to achieve.
It reminded me of God of Fury in one very specific way: that particular brand of denial where a character spends so long insisting they don’t want something that you start rooting for the want more than for the person themselves. You stop caring whether Lan admits he loves Brett. You just want Lan to admit he’s allowed to want anything at all. When he finally gets there, the payoff is genuine.
The ending is good. The journey is long and sometimes frustrating. And there’s a bonus epilogue from Brett’s POV available through the author’s newsletter, which — based on what I’ve heard from people who’ve read it — gives you exactly the inside access to Brett that the main book withholds.
Worth reading if you have patience for a slow burn that leans heavy on one character’s emotional damage, and if you appreciate kink written with genuine psychological weight rather than just heat. Go in knowing it’s more character study than plot-driven romance, and you’ll probably enjoy it more than you expect.