After really enjoying the first book in the Heirs of Hansol series, Temporary Wife Temptation, I regret to report that I found Secret Crush Seduction to be disappointing. That’s not to say there weren’t elements I enjoyed, but I spent far too much reading time trying to parse out the backstory between the characters and decide if various elements of the plot were making me uncomfortable or not.

Secret Crush Seduction follows the younger sister of the Song family, Adelaide, and her older brother’s best friend, Michael. Michael is Adelaide’s childhood crush, and Michael has become aware that someone he once considered a child has become a hot adult. Adelaide wants to be able to work for her family’s apparel company, Hansol, and so she and Michael (who is also both Hansol’s and the Song family’s PR agent) work together on a charity fashion show to try to win Grandma Song’s approval.

This basic plot outline and setup is pretty straightforward, but things got muddled for me from there pretty early on. The attraction between Adelaide and Michael flares hot quickly and they decide they are going to have a secret relationship until the charity fashion show is over, at which point they will end it.

I don’t necessarily need my tropes to always make 100% real-world sense, but I was confused by the reasons both why it had to be secret and why it had to be temporary. Michael and Adelaide are both convinced that if they date publicly it will cause a scandal both publicly and within the Song household, but I couldn’t fully grasp why. Michael has some personal secret reasons why he thinks their affair has to be temporary (more on that later), but it was never clear why Adelaide agreed or thought that was a good idea. I guess it has to be secret because it’s temporary but the reasons why everyone agrees it needs to be temporary are…???

I was also moderately confused by Adelaide and Michael’s history and how it played into their present relationship. They’ve known each other since they were children because Michael was Adelaide’s brother’s best friend. However, there is an 8-year age difference between them. A big deal is made out of how Adelaide was so in love with Michael as a child/teen. Certainly it is perfectly developmentally normal for a child or teen to have an intense crush on an older, unattainable person. However, two things about the way this was framed in the book felt weird to me:

First, the book really treats Adelaide’s childhood love as basically being the same as her adult love for Michael. By this I mean to say there is no acknowledgement at any point that the kind of obsessive crush an adolescent has on a much older person is not the same thing as any sort of mutual lust/love/relationship between two adults. In fact, the book treats her feelings for Michael as sort of an adult as a continuation of her childhood feelings, which felt…uncomfy.

Second, as a corollary to the book treating Adelaide’s childhood love as basically the same as her adult love, characters make a really big point of telling Michael how she’s been in love with him for years as though he should have…noticed? When in fact, no, it’s good and normal that he was totally unaware as an adult that a teenager liked him. Of course he should not have ever taken that seriously and I was a little weirded out that there was even the barest implication that he should have.

Also, Adelaide continually talks about how they were “close friends” as children. This seems fairly unlikely as they are 8 years apart in age. I mean, my childhood nanny had a son about 7 years younger than me, and while I was and continue to be fond of him as a human being, we certainly were never “friends” as children. The developmental gulf was just too wide for that. I guess it’s possible that we are supposed to read Adelaide’s insistence on their close childhood friendship as somewhat self-deluding, but it did not come across that way.

The backstory elements could have been completely mediated by either a closer age gap OR a more explicit acknowledgement of the transition between childhood crush and adult love for Adelaide, coupled with cutting out the references to close childhood friendship. Alas, I remained confused and slightly uncomfortable every time this came up.

For all that, I thought Adelaide and Michael had great chemistry together, and when the story focused more on their present relationship without referencing the past so much, I found it engaging and enjoyable. They have excellent banter and their physical connection is very steamy.

I also actually really liked Adelaide as a character. On one hand, she’s confident, capable, and engaging. Internally, she struggles with feelings of unworthiness and insecurity as the perpetual baby in a powerful family who was a bit of a wild child in college. But she still ultimately knows her worth as a person and won’t settle for a relationship that is not between equals. One of the major tensions in the Adelaide/Michael relationship is her desire to not be treated like a precious, helpless child against his desire to protect and coddle her. While I think the way this dynamic was set up was a little bizarre for all the reasons I laid out above, I did appreciate that fundamentally Adelaide knew what she wanted and would not settle for less, even for someone she’s apparently loved for over a decade.

Unfortunately, I could not say I had the same positive feelings about Michael, whose head was so far up his ass for 98% of the book that I wanted to scream. I can’t talk about this without spoiling something about his character that doesn’t come out until maybe halfway into the book, but I also think it’s something that will bother a LOT of readers:

Thankfully, this does also lead to one of my favorite parts of the book–which I felt was worth half a letter grade or even more on its own:

But even with that A+ interlude and some groveling, I couldn’t feel that amazing about the two lovebirds getting back together because I kept thinking in my head, “this dude needs HELLA therapy.”

In addition to my confusion about the framing of Adelaide and Michael’s childhood relationship and my annoyance with Michael as a character, one other thing really cooled my feelings towards this book. Adelaide decides her personal cause for the charity show is going to be autism, because she has a friend with an autistic family member. So she decides to hold a design contest and have the finalists design sensory-friendly clothing and then hold a sensory-friendly fashion show with an auction as the charity event.

The way this was handled made me feel decidedly uneasy. I’m not necessarily going to get into the nitty-gritty of the rep in terms of how people speak about autism in this book even though it made me vaguely uncomfortable, because I think that is something a neurodivergent person would really need to speak on. So if anyone who is neurodivergent has already read this book and has insight on that I would be interested to hear their perspectives.

However, there is one significant issue I wanted to explicitly flag with how autism shows up in this book: this is a story about a bunch of neurotypical characters, some of whom know autistic people personally and some who do not, paternalistically “solving” the sensory challenges of autistic people. All the characters who actually are autistic (many of whom are only referenced and never shown) function almost exclusively as plot motivation for one or more neurotypical characters to “help” them.

This book never presents any scenario that truly promotes agency and empowerment for autistic people, which is icky. I found myself wondering, why weren’t any of the fashion designers in this book autistic? Barring that, why didn’t the project involve a process to formally consult autistic people about what they would want in business and formalwear, and compensate them for their expertise? This really made it hard for me to actually root for Adelaide’s professional success because her entire project felt fundamentally ableist in its premise that neurodivergent people need neurotypical people to fix their “problems” so that they can better blend in with neurotypical people.

I expected this book to be frothy, trope-y fun. While there were elements of that, I did think that my enjoyment of the book overall was heavily tempered both by confusing elements of the backstory and the handling of both Michael’s personal issues and autism as a charity cause. For that reason, while I would describe my average emotional reaction to reading this book as mildly positive, I would be pretty hesitant to recommend it. I think the reader just has to shut out too much cognitive dissonance for it to function as the sexy fun it is supposed to be.