Rating: 🤷🏻‍♀️

This book almost worked out for me—but there were too many things going against it for me to outright recommend it.

The tl;dr is that Ivy, 22, is trying to figure out life after her twin sister’s death, while also drowning in bills from her mother’s medical care. She’s working her way through a bucket list of sorts that her sister had written and they’d planned to do together. En route to that, she drives off the road after seeing… something… and is rescued by Leo, 35 (? can’t remember exactly), a grumpy, over-stressed billionaire.

And then the next day when he’s mourning his father passing over him for a big promotion, he has a medical crisis and she happens to be there. Having already lied to his family about a partner to get out of blind date setup situation, his family assumes she’s it and she goes along with the ruse in exchange for money. Naturally, feelings become real, and so on and so forth. There’s also some daddy/brat kink, hence the title.

Going based off of that, I thought I’d love Don’t Call Me Daddy. I can get down with a fake relationship, even if it’s completely implausible. But, unfortunately, Jeré Anthony asked me to suspend my disbelief a little too much with all of Ivy’s antics.

Here’s a non-comprehensive list of things I found unbelievable (including spoilers):

• To keep the ruse of their relationship going, Ivy tells all of his employees—while at work, mind you—scandalous (fake) details about their non-existent sex life. She’s 22 and lost in the world, but that is a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s included in the details that she’s telling someone from HR, too, which makes it extra ridiculous.
• Ivy also organizes a night out for the staff, which is fine, but it somehow quickly devolves into a wet t-shirt contest and colleagues are removing their bras even… like what? If this seriously happened at this small town work function, Leo would be fired for the liability. It’s ridiculous in a bad way.
• Leo has a sex room even though he’s basically celibate by the time he meets Ivy. It makes no sense that he has a sex room. The sex room would also be dusty, maybe? Like nothing about this detail makes any sense except maybe the author thought it would be hot. Things for hotness are fine, so long as they make sense.
• Some medical stuff that doesn’t track: Leo drinks alcohol almost immediately after being discharged for an ulcer (a no no) and Ivy takes a bath immediately after getting stitches, among some other things.
• Ivy has plans to go to Romania after the month of faking it is up, and she keeps saying in her chapters that she’s moving across the country. Does the girl not know where Romania is??? Is this just a mistake from the author??

Overall, this book was... fine? I had moments where I enjoyed it. I thought both Ivy and Leo had strong character growth (though with Ivy, the bar was in hell, tbh). But I ultimately mostly found it frustrating. I think it could have easily been 100 pages shorter, as well.