BOOK REVIEW: "The Desire Variable: A Nerdy and Steamy Workplace Romance" (Binary Hearts, #1) by Ana D'Arcy
Andrea "Andy" Walker nabs her dream job, working as a programmer at a prominent tech company. She loves the company's mission (creating apps to help people with various disabilities), and she loves all her coworkers.... except for one: her boss. Incredibly handsome but also incredibly cocky and distant, there is just something about Alexander "Lex" Coleman that inexorably draws Andy to him, and vice versa. They fight their attraction for as long as they can, but like a broken code, it just doesn't work.
I thought this was a pretty good book. It's very well written and I didn't really find too many typos. The characters could use a little more fleshing out -- although anything we learn about them comes from exposition dumps. We are TOLD Andy is a short Latina, we are TOLD that Lex isn't close with his family. The author beats us over the head telling us that Andy is a "nerdy girl," but honestly it felt a little reductive and surface-level. She wears Incredible Hulk t-shirts and likes "Lord of the Rings," and she codes for a living but that's about the extent of her nerdery. I feel like it's a TikTok/Instagram or mainstream type of nerdery, not TRUE nerdery. Come back to me when she watches "Babylon 5" and is able to recite passages from "The Silmarillion." Can she reference the schematics for the original USS Enterprise, NCC-1701? Does she have a strong opinion on the Vorlons vs. the Centauri? Does she know the history of fonts? Does she know who won the Battle of Mandalore? No? Oh but she likes 'Iron Man'?" Say no more. Andy is like what a popular kid would imagine a nerd to be. Plus, I got very strong "I'm not like other girls" vibes from Andy, despite all evidence to the contrary. She *is* like every other "nerdy" girl.
Lex is also the least nerdy nerd I've ever come across. Sure he works in tech and wears glasses but he is completely ignorant of even the "fake nerdy" stuff. So while I applaud D'Arcy for her representation of the Latina and hard-of-hearing/deaf communities, her representation of the nerd community fell short for me. Lex is very much a creature of habit, has an extremely dry sense of humor, and for the longest time couldn't be bothered with any sort of relationships outside of the most casual of casual sex. We know very little about Lex, other than the fact that he has three sisters and was born in Texas. Whereas Andy's Latina-ness is integral to her personality and character, Lex could be from Mars for all we know. It felt very one-sided. Surely Lex is worthy of his own backstory.
The sex scenes were spicy, and plentiful -- perhaps a little too plentiful. For the love of Pete, Lex, let the poor girl catch her breath! I enjoyed watching their encounters go from pure lust-filled encounters to loving and gentle -- well, maybe not always gentle -- interludes. Interludes that happen every other page, practically. I don't mind spicy scenes but sometimes too much of a good thing isn't so good.
I read this on my Kindle, like I do most of my books, and I kept checking the "percent read," waiting for the third-act breakup to come. Well, it came at like 99%. Yes, this book does end of a cliffhanger. I presume everything will be resolved in the second book, which comes out later this year. To be honest I'm not sure I'll bother with the second book when it comes out. I found "The Desire Variable" to be a fun little book and a quick read but I didn't really care about the characters too much. And the villains were all kind of one dimensional; there's one bad guy we don't even meet until the last 5% of the book. I didn't understand why he was even in there, other than to show Andy cussing him out in Spanish, and punching him in the nose. It didn't help much to dispel the "Mary Sue" vibes I got from her the entire time.
All in all I'd recommend this to people to read, with a heavy warning that there are A LOT of spicy scenes. If that's not your thing, you'll find yourself skipping over lots of pages. Even though I don't plan on reading the second book (but who am I kidding, I probably will read it anyway), I wouldn't tell anyone to avoid it.
