Author: Rufi Thorpe
Year published: 2024
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 304 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2024 Google Reading map): USA (CA)
Summary: As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.
Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?
Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.
Review: I hadn't realized that I have already read a book by this author, The Knockout Queen (link to my review). That one also tackled difficult subjects. I liked this novel more by the end than I did in the first half. On the surface it's the story of Margo, her unwanted/unplanned pregnancy at age 19, her dysfunctional family, and her job in the OnlyFans world. But really, it's about much more.
Margo's life mirrors so many young women: pregnant, alone, financially unstable, and doing a job that society doesn't deem "worthy" in order to provide for herself and her child. The US is just not set up to support our people who need it the most. Margo is judged by her friends, her family, and the government agencies that are meant to help.
And don't get me started on women who are sex workers and how they are viewed. Society assumes they are uneducated and "trashy." They are taking care of families, children, themselves, and more. Somehow their clients are given a free pass even though the women's jobs wouldn't exist without the clients.
Ok. I've ranted enough. Margo is a good mix of really young and floundering and someone who is finding her power. She is holding it all together in the face of everyone else have no faith in her at all. And I like that there is hope by the end. She is 100% looking out for her baby and herself, making sure that they have what they need in life and that includes good (but realistically flawed) people around them.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet (Author)--T
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