Hi friends!
I *LOVED* The Roommate (See review here) so I immediately added The Intimacy Experiment to my list and was super excited for Naomi’s romance but I will say this story wasn’t quite what I expected but in the best way!
One of the best things about love, real love, is that it doesn’t demand perfection. It simply invites us to live up to our potential.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
Published by Berkley in 2021
Genre & Rep: Adult Romance (Contemporary) | Jewish MC | Queer Rep (Bi MC)
When higher ed won’t hire Naomi Grant for live lecturing she joins forces with Ethan Cohen, a new rabbi whose synagogue is in desperate need of new members. Together they host a seminar series on Modern Intimacy, the syllabus for love’s latest experiment, but neither of them expected they’d be the ones putting it to the test.
The world is cruel and unrelenting, full of pain and injustice and I am a stick of dynamite. Sometimes ineffectual, other times unnecessarily destructive, but, on occasion, enough to at least temporarily disrupt the rhythm of the patriarchal abyss threatening to suck down everything I care about and hold it hostage.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
I will say I definitely enjoyed The Roommate better than this one which isn’t that surprising considering how much I connected with Clara’s character and I am always a sucker for a golden retriever hero so I immediately fell in love with Josh. But also this book moved a lot slower in my opinion and was not nearly as smutty as I expected it to be based off The Roommate and how openly sexual Naomi is, but it was also understandable given the circumstances and the way the story was set up and the relationship developing between Naomi and Ethan. But don’t worry there is still some steamy smut 😏
I loved getting to see Josh and Clara again and really exploring the friendship that developed between Clara and Naomi because it’s unexpected and yet feel inevitable and they balance each other out so well with a deep understanding of how the other works and thinks and what they need and ugh I love them.
Maid of honor was never a title Naomi had expected to earn. She had a lot of friends and various lovers, both past and present tense, but she still kept most of them at arm’s length. It was kind of nice, maybe, that she was important enough to someone to be invited to stand up next to her on one of the biggest days of her life.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
I’m not Jewish so I can’t speak to the specifics of the representation BUT as someone who was raised pretty religiously and then once I was on my own kind of drifted away and is now trying to figure out where faith fits into my life I appreciated the nuance this story allowed and the conversations that took place about faith and science and the rabbi who only became a rabbi after experiencing a traumatic loss and a sex worker who was drawn to faith but didn’t think there was a place for her.
Faith was so personal. Sometimes sharing that part of yourself felt like exposing something fragile to the windstorm of the world.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
I loved the way that Ethan approached religion and how it was intertwined with his belief in science and his overwhelming belief in the ability of religion to adapt and evolve and exist in modern times in modern relationships. Science changes with the discovery of new information, new technology, new studies, why can’t religion? Why does religion and faith have to be rigid, set in stone from a time vastly different then our present?
Faith and science, at least in my definition, are fluid. They flex and adapt, bend and evolve, just like people, to survive. It’s a thoroughly logical proposition.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
But more importantly while the story talks about Judaism and it’s intricacies and specifics it really focuses more on faith in general. About understanding why people turn to religion and why faith is so enticing. Ethan’s many clashes with the board of his synagogue also shows that if people are willing to fight for it there is (and should be) space for everyone to feel welcome without fear of judgement or feeling pressured to change.
There are so many pieces of the human experience that can’t be explained, that fall outside the scope of our comprehension.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
I love romances that take place over weeks because 1. I find it more believable than like insta-love or romances that occur in 2-3 days but 2. I like the building of tension and all the little moments that develop into a relationship. Yeah, in the real world two months might not seem like a long time, but by romance standards that feels like years and yeah maybe that’s why this story felt a little slower, but it also was worth it for the result of the intensity of their relationship.
She looked like the first meteor shower he’d ever seen—impossible and brilliant, so far away but somehow also right inside his chest.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
I loved the acknowledgement that their relationship wouldn’t be easy and that they would be pissing a lot of people off and that also yes it sounds like the punchline to a bad joke. But I also love how much they let open themselves up to the other and that irony of ironies he’s the only one in that initial meeting not to judge her and to offer her the opportunity she’s looking for. They have both been through trauma and had reasons to hold themselves back but once they commit it was an all in type of thing. Also the way that Ethan constantly defended her in a way that was respectful and quiet and entirely him.
Sometimes love is your own quiet rebellion.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
Naomi just as a character and her experiences and she is like intersectional queen as a bisexual, Jewish sex worker who then started a sex-positive education platform and wants to take it to the classrooms like YES. But more importantly her experience as a young women with the leaked nudes and the slut shaming and the ostracizing in school and her community is not a rare occurrence, but all too frequent. I loved getting to learn more about her from before we met her in The Roommate and getting to see her moments of vulnerability peeking through the armor she built around herself.
Love really was a terrible weakness. No other vice made you vulnerable in quite the same way. Naomi wasn’t a monster. Despite the consequences, she still loved people. She just tried to keep it to a minimum, firmly believing that you didn’t have to be close to love someone, you just had to be committed.
The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan
If you liked the writing and the characters of The Roommate, enjoy stories talking about relationships, intimacy, and faith, and want a main character dedicated to destroying the patriarchy and looking hot doing it than I would highly recommend this book!
💫 Have you read The Roommate yet? What’s your favorite kind of romance hero?
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