Rating: 👍🏻

I’ve now read four books by Nenia Campbell. I started with Rent Girl, which was a wild one to start with because Dominic is a terrifying hero—he makes a smoothie of a guy’s hand and then makes him drink it (… he deserved it)—but it definitely set me up to find many of her other heroes far less scary as a result.

Like, sure, the romances are pretty toxic as a whole—in Raise the Blood, for instance, there’s a vibe of “does Cal want to kill her or keep her” and in Little Deaths, Rafe tells his stepmother he’ll help her out of the financial shit show her late husband left her in if she fucks him—but in comparison to Dom? They’re peaches.

That brings us to Quid Pro Quo. The basic plot is this: 28-year-old millionaire investor Nick blackmails his older stepsister, Jay, 32, into boning him for multiple years for money for her mom (this part didn’t actually make sense to me), but mostly so he won’t release a photo of a sex worker who looks just like her under her name and ruin all chances of her having a further career/life. The book goes back and forth between their lives as kids and 2017 (present day-ish), showing how their childhood trauma shaped them.

Ok, so let’s talk about the elephant in the room for a moment before we get to my other feelings: the stepfucking. I normally don’t enjoy step-sibling romances where the main characters grew up together. My very specific brand of childhood trauma makes sibling-adjacent stuff a major trigger for me—especially when it comes to coercion. So I will say I hesitated before reading Quid Pro Quo once I knew that Nick and Jay were children in the same house (he was 10 and she was 14 when her mom married his dad).

Clearly, I decided to read it anyway. I did so largely because of how much I liked Campbell’s other books I’ve read. I don’t know how to explain it, really, but she has such an ability to take situations and characters that on the surface sound really fucking horrifying and then through her writing and storytelling gets you to think less black and white/good and evil and care and, in some cases, even root for things you wouldn’t normally root for. It’s like she reminds us that these are people, albeit fictional, who are the products of their trauma.

All that said, Nick is, so far for me, the hero I’ve had the hardest time with. I could accept Dominic’s terrifying violence due to the nature of Rent Girl being a cartel book. Raise the Blood’s Cal really benefitted from his culty family being so much worse than him. And Rafe (sweet, emo Rafe) in Little Deaths was so tame in comparison. But something about Nick just didn’t sit right with me.

What he had going for him—and also against him, in some regard— is that his father was a Grade A Creep Asshole who I wanted to personally kill the second he leered at 14-year-old Jay in such a suggestive way. Fucking gross. In comparison, Nick definitely seemed like the safer person in the home. But 19-year-old Nick blackmailing Jay with a video he took of her pleasuring herself in her room so that she’d sleep with him? Felt way too much like his father for my taste.

It was a relief when, at 28, he’d grown up and become a bit more of his own person, less hellishly entitled overall. Though he still seemed to think he was entitled to Jay, considering he pulled the same exact stunt he did when he was 19.

And let’s talk about Jay for a moment. On the surface, Jay could be seen as a bit of a pushover, but I think her character is more nuanced than that. Like yes, she didn’t negotiate the details when Nick blackmails her at 23, nor when he did it again when she’s 32, but why would she have when she didn’t know it was an option? The neglect she experienced as a child, along with her mother’s consistent critical remarks, made Jay shrink so much she didn’t know her own agency.

The cover of the book shows a birdcage, which is hugely symbolic because Nick calls her “Blue Jay” and “Little Bird.” You could read that as Nick caging her, but my interpretation is the opposite. I think she’s caged already when we first meet her in 2017 because while she thinks she may be free, her life is relatively small, she keeps everyone at arm’s length and even pushes a lot of people away, and she doesn’t know how to live (as opposed to survive). While I don’t personally think Nick is responsible for setting her free, I think she starts to learn how to open the unlocked door of her own cage as the book progresses.

Do I think she gets there fully in Quid Pro Quo? No. Did I need a much bigger come-to-Jesus moment for Nick, and a much bigger grovel to make up for his atrocious behavior? Absolutely. Did some things not quite track for me (like having sex for money for Jay’s mom being a part of the deal)? Yeah. But Campbell’s writing is so beautiful that I was able to look past these things. It also helps that I know she’s currently writing the sequel, Sine Non Qua, which I’m hoping will address at least a couple of these things.