Still Hot for You by Diane Escalera

Grade: C
passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Escalera,

In the teaser for your book, Still Hot for You, your publisher Lyrical Press, describes it thusly:

Want to get your man talking?  Give him booty!

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And Shay LaCosta is pretty desperate. She’s wrecked her blissful marriage of five years by demanding she and her husband Dylan have a baby. What the hell was she thinking? She knows she was wrong and she’s ready to set things right, if only Dylan will let her. Bet he can’t shun her Booty Camp offer: delicious, white-hot sex in exchange for what’s going on inside his brain.

My curiosity was peaked. I wondered if perhaps you’d offer up an interesting tale of a couple dealing with the stress of trying to have a baby or with the stress that comes when, in a committed relationship, one person’s vision for a shared future isn’t the same as the other’s. I should have paid more attention to the fact that your blurb used the word “booty” twice in less than two paragraphs. Your book is mostly about the varied ways Shay and Dylan have sex in their upscale house. It wasn’t very interesting or, to me, erotic.

I, like you (according to your biography), am married with kids. Like your heroine, Shay, I was once twenty-nine and hell-bent on having a baby. I mention my own experience because I found Shay’s desire to have a baby pretty normal. I think many couples, after several years together, do begin to think about having kids. (About 75% of American women have had at least one child.)  And let’s be honest, the older a woman is, the less easy it is for her to conceive. (Fertility starts to decline for women from about the age of 30, dropping down more steeply from the age of 35.)  So, to me, Shay’s desire seemed pretty sane.

That’s not to say I didn’t empathize with Dylan’s lack of interest in a baby. He’s dug himself out of poverty, works really hard, and isn’t sure he’s financially ready to take on the responsibility of a child. Kids are expensive—in 2011, the average cost for raising a kid in the USA from birth to 18 (this excludes college) was just under $200,000. Having a baby is a life changer.

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