4.25 - 4.5ish stars

This book made me feel very sad but in a good way? Like my heart hurts. This is my second Courney Milan and I am already in love with her writing.

What didn't work for me, and prevented me from 5 stars: Blake and Tina decide to "switch lives" for a semester. He's a billionaire heir to a tech company and she's an immigrant and student from a working-class family. They agree to part ways entirely once the semester is up. Oh but feelings come along, because DUH! I feel like if you fall in love with each other it's okay to just say that and stop thinking so gloomily about having to disappear from one another's lives once the time period of your whatever you want to call it is up. Like, things were already tense enough! ( )

I don't have much to say about this. It's a romance novel, and I haven't read such a thing in decades, so I can't compare it to anything except my recollection of reading Angelique as an adolescent, when it was forbidden and titillating. I suspect this one may be a bit better than average, as the story line actually had some substance, and wasn't just a blanket where the steamy bits take place. Tina Chen is a very broke college student, who takes a class with Blake Reynolds, the son of one of the tech world's most powerful and wealthiest men. They have a contretemps in class over social welfare programs. She thinks he's clueless. He thinks she might be the solution to his identity crisis. She tells him he couldn't live her life for 2 weeks. He turns that challenge around and offers to trade lives for the rest of the semester. I liked the characters; they are bright, competent, witty and...well....likeable. But given their life experiences up until the point where we meet them (they have both functioned as grown-ups for some time) some of their emotional thought processes seemed immature. I guess that if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like. I think I prefer my romances to be historical.
Review written in 2016 ( )

I am a fan of Courtney Milan historicals, so when she was handing out copies of a contemporary, I was skeptical. It took me this long to pick it up.

First, I thought it was a baseball themed book based on the title. It’s not. Its more a prince and the pauper story, with the pauper being a Chinese American girl, and Trade Me is “let’s trade lives for a month.” Ms Milan delivers on so many levels, from Tina’s history to Blake’s personality. As a rule, I’m not a fan of billionaire heroes, but she has made him so very likeable and relatable, and Tina so fractured it hurts, right up to the point where she sees herself for who she is. I very much enjoyed the ride! ( )

The first contemporary romance by this author I've read; I enjoyed it as much as her historicals. The injustices just... fester a little more because they're contemporary and ongoing regardless of one couple getting together. Plus "getting together" feels a little less final than the other HEAs because of how many complications there are likely to be in an ongoing relationship between them, and how much easier it is to break up these days... ( )

Trade Me is a complex contemporary romance that balances themes of poverty, parental pressure, and mental illness. It suffers from some pacing issues at the end, but I loved Tina and Blake enough that I hardly noticed. Milan speaks to the experience of being poor in a way I don't often read, something that really resonated with me personally. The story also touches on immigration law and the assumptions we make about other people. On a lighter note, Milan's love of gadgets is evident in her descriptions of Cyclone's tech. Source: Audible Romance Package

CW: drug use, disordered eating. ( )