PRE-RELEASE REVIEW: 'How to Bang a Billionaire' by Alexis Hall
Title: How to Bang a Billionaire
Series: Arden St. Ives Book 1
Author: Alexis Hall
Published: April 16, 2017
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Genre: Contemporary Romance; Erotic Romance
Length: 320 Pages
Tags: Gay; M/M; College
About How to Bang a Billionaire
Rules are made to be broken . . .
If England had yearbooks, I'd probably be "Arden St. Ives: Man Least Likely to Set the World on Fire." So far, I haven't. I've no idea what I'm doing at Oxford, no idea what I'm going to do next and, until a week ago, I had no idea who Caspian Hart was. Turns out, he's brilliant, beautiful . . . oh yeah, and a billionaire.
It's impossible not to be captivated by someone like that. But Caspian Hart makes his own rules. And he has a lot of them. About when I can be with him. What I can do with him. And when he'll be through with me.
I'm good at doing what I'm told in the bedroom. The rest of the time, not so much. And now that Caspian's shown me glimpses of the man behind the billionaire I know it's him I want. Not his wealth, not his status. Him. Except that might be the one thing he doesn't have the power to give me.
5 HEART READ
REVIEW:
While reading Alexis Hall’s How to Bang a Billionaire, I imagined reporters listening to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, wondering, “How can my paltry words convey this magnitude?” And I was grateful I rarely award 5 heart reviews. Though How to Bang a Billionaire, the first book in Hall’s new Arden St. Ives series, should earn six hearts.
This not-so-subtle gay parody of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, might as well have been called How It Should Have Been Written.
Though I (shamefacedly) enjoyed James’ novel, Hall whips victory laps around her.
Hall uses many similar plot devices:
(a) Arden St. Ives, soon to graduate Oxford in literature, covers for his sick roommate at a fundraiser, calling wealthy alumni, to ask for school donations. Immediately, we connect with our hero.
“I was supposed to be doing this college-fund-raiser thing where undergraduates called up wealthy alumni and connected deeply with them in a way that got them all nostalgic and wallet-opening or bank-transferring. I had no f@#king clue how I was going to work ‘and how would you feel about endowing a Chair of Philosophy in perpetuity’ into a casual conversation with a complete stranger.” Then Arden reaches the reclusive young billionaire Caspian Hart, flirts, and makes Caspian laugh.
(b) Arden trips when they meet at the ensuing dinner, “in front of a man I desperately, desperately want to…not fall over in front of.” Caspian is a “vision of exquisite masculinity … flawless, from his graceful long-fingered hands, to that stern mouth, its unyielding curve touched by the faintest hint of sensuality. And those gray-blue wolf’s eyes, all ice and savagery, watching me.”
“Arden St. Ives?”
“Nope,” I mumbled. “Definitely not. He’s someone else. Someone really attractive and totally vertical.”
By the end of the night their attraction has blossomed. ”Somehow I’d trusted him to take from me exactly what I needed to give.”
(c) After graduation, Caspian saves a drunk Arden from unwanted advances at a bar. From there, however, the two tales diverge. Of course, Caspian is into kinky stuff. But in this case, Arden is more so, and tries to unravel Caspian’s moderation. “I believe in controlling one’s vices,” Caspian says. "Really?...Because I believe in letting them run riot,” Arden answers.
And this is the crux of their conflict. While acknowledging that ambition is “A fire that burns in empty places,” Caspian expends his energy in business. He longs for a bit of Arden’s joie de vivre, even as Arden flails, deciding what to do post-Oxford,
But both are commitment-phobes who make a mess of their interactions. Over and over, attempting to explain what they need, their insecurities push the other away. “Discovering the distance between how you saw something-and saw yourself-and the way someone else did, and feeling cheapened by that distance.”
As both men knock into each other’s bodies, emotions, and identities, recoiling at their desires and insecurities, readers laugh and cry at the contrariness of human nature.
“It still made my heart reel: the ease with which he could think one thing-feel one thing-and do another. That he could share even a small piece of my pleasure and still turn away.”
And then, somehow, Arden and Caspian would hit a consonant note, and I could breathe again. When had I stopped? Was it between Hall’s carefully crafted, deeply intuitive psychological relationships? Was it the magnificence of his language, which paints the men’s defects with loving poignancy?
Reading Fifty Shades, I thought, that’s how I might feel in a similar situation. Reading Hall’s How to Bang a Billionaire, I think, this is me on a daily basis. Except, I’ve never expressed the minutiae of my brain as brilliantly, nor as accurately.
Hall, a supremely talented RITA-Award- winning writer, is still early in his career. He’s already in a category of his own and I plan to read his every book to watch his work mature.
A copy of How to Bang a Billionaire was provided to Kimmers’ Erotic Book Banter, by Hachette Book Group, at no cost and with no expectations in return. We offer our fair and honest opinion on behalf of our readers.
Meet the Author
Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the 21st century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret.
He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.
He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a 17th century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car.
He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.
For more from Alexis visit his website.
