Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage is a disturbingly dark, powerful, and emotional novel which follows Jonah, an aspiring playwright trying to make ends meet in NYC.

Not only is Jonah struggling to pay his bills and rent, he’s also having a difficult time making connections that might help jumpstart his writing career. Enter the wickedly famous playwright Richard Shriver. Jonah orchestrates a chance meeting with Richard and the two quickly become romantically involved. After several weeks of wining and dining, Richard invites Jonah on a trip to his home in the Hamptons. It seems that Jonah’s luck is starting to look up until that fateful weekend takes a sudden horrific turn.

I don’t want to go into much more about the plot but be aware that this novel is difficult to read at times. Trigger warnings: rape, physical and emotional abuse, drug abuse. Jonah and several other characters in the book experience extreme sexual and emotional trauma and I think Parks-Ramage did a great job handling such a difficult topic.

If I could rate the first 50% of this book, I’d give it 5 stars. However, around the 70% mark, the storyline became choppy and the ending felt rushed. Overall, I’m rating this book 3.5 stars.

Thank you to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Wow. This book is both a queer psychological thriller and a meditation on how religion can profoundly impact our identities and relationships, particularly for those in the LGBTQ community. At times, the story felt incredibly dark and disturbing, with the propulsive plot and twists of a thriller, and at others the writing was contemplative and insightful in tackling the grief and trauma that define this narrative. This book totally surprised me, and I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it. I'm grateful for the author's voice and the respectful way he tackled the issues in the story.

Please research the trigger/content warnings for rape, sexual assault, conversion therapy, substance abuse, and suicide before reading if you think that will be important for you ⚠️.

Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC!

I thought I knew what I was signing up for with this book, but in no way was I prepared. This was DARK.

Jonah is a poor NYC transplant with dreams of being a playwright. He works at a restaurant with just a terrible human for a manager, and his finances are basically nonexistent. Then he meets Richard.

Richard, a very successful playwright some thirty years his senior, and Jonah begin a relationship that is pretty dark from the get-go. Richard convinces Jonah to come with him for a weekend to the Hamptons, and shit gets real bad, real quick.

This book was not an easy read, but I could not stop reading it. I couldn't believe what was happening and had to know what was going to go down next. Jonah is not exactly a likable character, yet I could not stop rooting for him. I wanted him to succeed and do better and STOP PUTTING HIMSELF IN TERRIBLE SITUATIONS.

As other reviewers have noted, the back half of the book hits hard on religion. I, however, thought it fit with where Jonah's headspace was and didn't necessarily mind the story going there. Also, this is a debut novel? So, like, damn. I can't wait to see what else JPR does!

This was a hard one to rate because it deals with such heavy themes. So, saying I enjoyed all this feels like the wrong words, but I did read it in less than 12 hours, so. It was a very intense reading experience, and if you can handle dark and gloomy and all the mentioned triggers above, give it a go!

TWs: rape, victim-blaming, gaslighting, abuse, super toxic relationships, conversion therapy, homophobia, drug abuse, a whole lot of religious stuff, mentions of child sexual abuse and incest, suicide, basically sexual slavery

Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage is a difficult book to read. I certainly can't say that I enjoyed it but it was thought-provoking. Books like this are integral to Society moving forwards and I feel as though they should always be promoted and read.

Jonah comes from an extremely religious family ... and his escape route was to create a lie that would ruin his father. This book is about Jonah and his relationship with Richard. Richard happens to be a powerful, wealthy, successful playwright while Jonah is an aspiring writer. Jonah sets his sights on Richard; he thinks he's attractive and he wants to meet him. What he doesn't expect is the way their relationship begins to quickly erode the control he has over his own life.

Jonah goes from "finding a boyfriend" to being sexually and physically assaulted constantly while being held captive on a compound. Jonah is a very interesting character. He isn't always likable and I can't say that I even understood all his decisions. There were definitely times when I was angry with him, times when I was frustrated - but I think that's a nod to Jonathan Parks-Ramage's writing. But isn't this how we deal with our trauma?  We think we have it all figured out and often we do the exact opposite of what we should.

Jonathan Parks-Ramage has written an important piece of work. This is a definite exploration into the way that a power imbalance in a relationship can be weaponized. Because of the events in Jonah's past, he lacks confidence and a secure foundation. By dating Richard, Jonah is trying to create a world in which he has love, a home, and security. Sadly, Richard is just the kind of vile kind of human being who will take advantage of someone like Jonah.

The plot is revealed through Jonah's POV. I did find it a bit disconcerting when he was addressing a character simply referred to as "you". But, the author has done a great job of unraveling the story in a way that makes it intriguing in spite of how disturbing and frightening it is. 

This book is difficult to read because of the subject matter, perhaps made even more poignant by the fact that the Queer community has long dealt with the issues that are depicted within. The #MeToo movement may have lost a bit of its value to the press but these types of stories will always be important and valid. This book wasn't what I expected but it has certainly left an impression on me that will be long-lasting.

Wow...I don't...really know what to say about this book...? It's dark...and twisted...and grabs ahold of you. You keep wondering where the book's going after that opening moment. Will it be a revenge tale? Will it have a sad ending or an uplifting one? It's 100% a page turner. But...

...it falls a bit flat, probably because of the expectations I had going into it. Is it timely? Oh yes. Is it deep? Yep...there's a lot to unpack here. It had me right up to the point where (non spoiler here, as you know it happens from the moment the book starts) where Jonah escapes. Then it just...flounders. You think it's going to go one way, then it zags in a different, unnecessary religious direction that ultimately goes nowhere and thus feels like filler to get to the end point, which seems rushed and convenient. What you want to happen doesn't, and then it's over, and it's a bit disappointing. Not enough to write off the story being told, but...enough to make you want to give it 3 stars instead of 4, if you know what I mean. And it's such a dark story, I can't really see myself ACTIVELY handselling it..but if someone asks about it, I can tell them my thoughts.

Overall, a solid book with a not-so-great denouement.

I was LOVING this book, and then at the 60% mark, I stopped loving it. It completely shifted directions and relied so heavily on religion, I just wasn’t feeling it. In a way I was happy how it ended, but it also didn’t feel like the first 60% matched the tone of the last 40%.

This book started like a bucket of iced water in the middle of a humid summer. I was all in and ready for it. However, by the middle of the book, the story felt disconnected and a bit choppy. Truthfully, both ends of the book felt like two entire writers. The story is important and more opportunity should be given to normalize LGBTQ stories. In this case, the writing just was not for me and it did end up getting extremely religious and it took over the main character's story.

This book has been getting a lot of buzz online and I was really looking forward to it, unfortunately there were a few issues that really bothered me with this one.

Yes, Daddy is the story of Jonah, a young man new to New York who enters a relationship with Richard, an older celebrity playwright and filmmaker. From the beginning the parallels to Bryan Singer are obvious, with the setting quickly whisking off to an idyllic vacation compound in The Hamptons.

The marketing of this book seems to focus on it being a light gay beach read, but this book is full of trauma. There are several detailed accounts of sexual assault, conversion therapy, religious trauma, drug use (including forced drug use), suicide ideation, parental abuse, incest, and more. It felt like every type of trauma and issue that queer people face had to be shoved in here somehow. There was a traumatic event about 90% of the way through that was completely unnecessary to the plot, and it just made this a list of traumatic incidents for the sake of it.

I was most disappointed by what this book had to say about trauma. It's clear from the writing and the acknowledgements that the author has religious affiliations and I'm sure that played a part in it. Through this story it seems like the message is that this character enjoys rough or kinky sex, and even same-sex attraction itself, because he is "damaged goods." The fact that he has issues with his own father and religion is the reason that he seeks out "risky" sex, and this just further contributes to the stigma that people who engage in consensual, kinky relationships face.

I thought that the book was interesting and well written for the first 75%, but once the story jumped ahead a few years I found it really started to go downhill. Most of the events in this section were unnecessary and I wished the story took a narrower focus. There were a few time jumps, which made it difficult to tell when the narrator was actually telling this story, and why he was telling it in this way. I found a lot of Jonah's decisions unrealistic and difficult to identify with.

Maybe I'm not the target audience for this, but as someone who has experienced trauma similar to some described in this novel (though not nearly to the extremes that this story takes things) I figured that I needed to chime in - this book is climbing a slippery slope in the way that it talks about how and why people hurt each other, so it's not a book that I can recommend.

"Trauma is like a gift. The shittiest fucking gift in the world. Coal in your motherfucking stocking. But the minute you receive it, it becomes yours. And it’s your responsibility, what you do with it. And you can use it as an excuse to destroy your life and destroy the lives of people around you, but you shouldn’t."

I wasn't at all prepared for what the book entailed, I came knowing that this book might be triggering for me or for some, and that this should be approached carefully. But this doesn't change the fact of how this is a masterpiece of a book, how it made me feel sick and sad and hopeless all at the same time.

The writing was good, knowing this is an arc and has its technical errors, it presented a way of writing in which it felt whimsical but not the way "whimsical" usually means. It didn't fail to bring the feeling of how a letter feels like, directly addressing you whoever reads it, even though you were never meant to be in its receiving end. The characters were flawed, imperfect, facing mental and emotional issues, and most of all, they feel humane. To be able to read this and go through it feeling like you're actually watching it transpire right in front of you, and you're helpless and left to go through and rummage through the pages to know if what you hoped for was what happened in the ending. Topics that were discussed as part of the story were all done well, especially the part where trauma was mentioned and correlated to the characters and the current transpiring events. I finished this book gaining yet another beautiful and necessary insight regarding how people deal with their trauma/s.

This book has provided me questions to ponder and think about as I try to find my next read and surely people who will read this will have theirs too. But as mentioned above, this book deal with heavy topics such as rape, sexual slavery, homophobia, drugs and suicide (I may have forgot to mention something—if there's still any— but these are some of the major trigger warnings you should be aware before delving into this book). If any of these themes triggers you or you find uncomfortable to tread, may as well consider this a book not to your liking, or a book that you can pass for valid reasons.

Nonetheless, this book didn't fail to surprise me and left me with so many emotions. From time to time, I would randomly remember reading this book and redirect my thoughts to all my unanswered questions. Yes, Daddy is a must-read for those people who can muster the strength to go through pages of unrelenting horrors that many people we may or may not know, suffer/ed. A book that should be read with an open-minded approach and understanding view of how these indisputable events are capable of being real in the world we live in, and that this book offers thought-provoking insights and opinions that will vary from each reader.

Huge thank you to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC in exchange for an honest review..

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, and Yes, Daddy did not disappoint. Sunset Boulevard meets The Assistant with this new thrilling drama.

In Yes, Daddy, a young gay writer - Jonah - is struggling: money is tight, he has a strained relationship with his mother, and he desperately wants to be a writer. One night while working as a host at his exploitative job, he meets famous playwright Richard, who quickly becomes enamored with him.

The two quickly fall head-over-heels for each other, until it becomes apparent that Richard is not who he says he is. Under the glitz and glamour of potential fame and money, Jonah slowly descends into a world filled with deception and horror, until it becomes apparent that he can’t get out.

While I had some problems with the pacing in the beginning, Jonathan Parks-Ramage lets the end of the novel untangle like a confession: whispered to the reader in the dark of the night. It's a heavy novel, and a bit remnant of A Little Life in it's cruelness, but Yes, Daddy is a fantastic debut novel.

Amazon Studio's has already picked up the film right's with Stephen Dunn (Closet Monster) set to write and direct. I can't wait!

Full review to come for Obscur Media closer to the book's release date.

I went into YES, DADDY by Jonathan Parks-Ramage thinking that it was going to be a twisty psychological thriller. What I found, instead, was an emotionally wrenching literary examination of abuse, power dynamics, self hatred, and predation, and a look at the #MeToo movement through the eyes of a gay man. While it never quite treads into trauma or degradation porn, it comes pretty darn close at times. But Parks-Ramage skillfully walks that fine line, instead being honest with the numerous horrors in these pages without making them titillating or exploitative. Jonah is such a fascinating character, his complexities running deep and feeling very realistic in how his past traumas (and present ones) shape him into the person that he is as the story goes on, for better and (more significantly) for worse. From being abused for being gay by his Evangelical parents to conversion therapy to living in poverty to finding himself in a manipulative and abusive relationship with famous playwright Richard, Jonah is incredibly sympathetic, while also being incredibly damaging to others. Parks-Ramage really hits the nail on the head here with how trauma can shape people in ways that can make them very toxic and hurtful, and how difficult navigating that can be. This book is filled with trigger warnings, from graphic depictions of rape to psychological torment to self harm. But when all is said and done, there is a small glimmer of hope that Parks-Ramage finds, which I found to be quite lovely.

YES, DADDY is gut wrenching and intense, raw and powerful. Brace yourself if you do decide to read it, but know that it has a lot of important things to say.

So the first half (roughly) of this novel was mostly great. It’s really gripping and makes you want to keep reading. I don’t think the writing is particularly beautiful or interesting, but it’s extremely fast and readable, which is more important in a novel of this kind. (Maybe this is only an issue with the ARC, but section breaks were almost imperceptible, just a tiny difference in paragraph spacing that you don’t notice half the time, breaking up the flow a bit since it required going back to make sure you hadn’t missed anything.) So it started out as 3.5 or even 4 stars for me. But then things take such a dramatic turn for the worse, then the really worse, then just awful, then the worst.

I feel misled by the title, cover and the promo. I went into it wanting ‘a propulsive, scorching modern gothic’ and expecting a certain fun detachment and a degree of like mindless, stylish, trashy fun, which the first half of the novel sort of delivers, and ended up with like ‘A Little Life’-core levels of gay trauma porn in the second half. Clearly a significant portion of the population, many straight, find gay characters being subjected to absolutely ridiculous levels of trauma and abuse one of the best forms of entertainment, so I have no doubt this will be a commercial triumph (it’s already been picked up for an Amazon Studios adaptation). I was hesitant about leaving a negative review, but since it’s already such a hit judging by I don’t feel guilty about criticising this debut novel.

After the initial, already extremely traumatic events, there is a collection (really, make a little summary of key events and see for yourself) of traumatic experience upon traumatic experience. Some of which just reach absolutely deranged levels, and all of which simply feel like a plot device to keep the misery quota astronomically high.

This review says as much about me and what I want as it does about the book, and I’m aware of that, but I think the marketing of this novel is really misleading and I hate to think of LGBTQ readers picking this up expecting what I was expecting and being pummelled by a constant stream of trauma and abuse porn, so I just wanted to warn people.

I suppose at the very least the author is a gay man himself, which isn’t the case with some popular gay trauma porn darlings, and luckily the ending was OK.

TL;DR: if you’re the sort of person who loves gay trauma porn (content warnings for literally everything you can think of), you’re in for a treat; if you’re looking for a fun Gothic novel with a gay protagonist, STEER CLEAR OF THIS (or drop it halfway through).

I read some negative critical reviews while trying to gather my thoughts and I really liked this one: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3903034470. I think the comments on why it doesn’t work as Gothic hit the nail on the head.

Full review (some spoilers marked as such) on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3941771131

Yes, Daddy is like a mix of Pretty Little Liars (the glamour, the designer brand name drops) with the vibe of Fifty Shades of Gray (the rich, mysterious man with kinks) but written by a V.C. Andrews fan.

TW: rape, mental/emotional/physical abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, body shaming

Summary:

Jonah Keller is a Midwest transplant to New York City, working as a waiter to make ends meet. The son of a previous megachurch preacher, he’s estranged from his father and barely speaks to his mother except for when he’s in need of money. And he needs it, badly. But then he finds potential sugar daddy Richard Shriver, a rich playwright whose photo he comes across in an ad for an upcoming screening hosted by Richard. And so Jonah plans to impress Richard by learning his favorite restaurants, movies, and whatever else he can find on the internet to guarantee their meeting is successful. Dressed to perfection in designer clothes, paid for with what little rent money he had, Jonah shows up to the screening and catches Richard’s eyes, thus beginning their fated courtship.

Richard gives Jonah the life he’d always dreamed of. To his delight, Richard invites Jonah to vacation with him at his compound for the summer, shared with his closest friends. Jonah gets swept up in the glamorous fantasies of what this shared vacation holds for him, dreaming of romantic beach days and sparkling summer evenings full of wine and fine food. As Jonah falls more in love with Richard, he falls more blind to Richard’s true intentions and more willingly makes excuses for the increasingly strange and cruel behavior. One drunken night, Jonah wakes to find himself being carried to a windowless structure by Richard and his friends, where he finds a trap door that leads only to pain and misery….


Thoughts:

This was a strange read, but not how I was expecting or wanting.

There wasn’t a single character I liked or gravitated towards. I disliked Jonah from the start, as he’s superficial and doesn’t have solid motivation for his actions. He was a very polarizing character, with extreme changes in emotions and thoughts and with very little reasoning behind his decisions. This didn’t seem like a purposeful character flaw, but a lack of fleshing out the character.The rest of the characters were one dimensional and mostly used to propel Jonah through the story (or put him through misery). It seemed like, if Jonah had a motivation, it was finding love or relationships with other men in his life. This motivation would have made more sense if it wasn’t so random! Jonah would have these sudden “epiphanies” that maybe life would be better if he was dating X character, but would then swivel back to whatever problem was in front of him. These thoughts were thrown out there, and with characters that weren’t fully established or just briefly mentioned.


The plot also felt very mashed together, as if the author had too many ideas and couldn’t settle on which were vital to the story. The first half feels like the queer, erotic thriller that it’s advertised as, while the second half turns into a religious redemption story. I was very confused and felt like I was reading a completely different story, until Jonah is taken advantage of again (reminiscent of the first half of the book) - this part was so out of place and unnecessary for me. Some of the violent and sad scenes were very over the top and eventually didn’t add to the story or my feelings for Jonah, just made me uncomfortable.

There was also a scene where Jonah encounters a young teen experiencing homelessness and stereotyping him as unstable and violent. There wasn’t any real purpose for this scene, except to show that Jonah is afraid of ending up basically “smelly, sad and homeless”. It was unnecessary to add this scene and only made me abhor Jonah more, and question the author’s reasonings. There were other various stereotypes that I sighed at, such as the overly feminine gay man, the beautiful queer drug abuser, and so on. Again this contributed to the flatness of the characters, but also made the story lack originality.

The only portion I enjoyed was the final chapter, as the awfulness was finally over and Jonah is finding peace in his life. There’s a really nice reconnection and redemption with a previous character that I had a sigh of relief, and there were some sweet scenes with Jonah and this character. However, the ending read like a completely different book and threw me off even further.

Petty Note:

Jonah is supposed to have gone to grad school for writing, having written several experimental plays in his time, but didn’t understand Richard referring to his “butler” Evan as “Mrs. Danvers” and Evan calling Jonah the “new Rebecca”? He hadn’t read Rebecca, or even heard of it??


This book was definitely not for me. I would say this book would best suit readers that like darker reads (and I mean very dark) with questionable characters, that are “event driven” instead of “plot driven”.

trigger warnings for: rape, victim-blaming, manipulation, gaslighting, abuse, toxic relationships, conversion therapy, homophobia, drug abuse, mentions of child sexual abuse and incest
3.5 stars
Thank you so much to netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book!
There are so many things in here I have mixed or conflicting feelings about. Let me start out by saying that Yes, Daddy is an objectively great book with a masterfully crafted cast, a well-thought-out arc, lots of things to say and make you think about as well as a gorgeous writing style. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is intrigued by the synopsis and doesn't mind following an unlikeable main character.
...which is the main thing that muddies the waters for me. Yes, Daddy is supremely uncomfortable to read. As signified by the fact that it took me almost two whole entire months to get through. I constantly had to put it down, and catch my breath before getting back to it and at times was dangerously close to DNFing. My main emotions while reading this were dread, horror, second-hand embarrassment, and discomfort. The uncomfortable nature of this read isn't just because of the content matter which is quite harrowing at times, but especially because of the main character and the way he makes decisions and goes about his relationship. Jonah is obsessive, codependent, messy, malleable, indecisive, and often hard to root for. He makes ill-informed, uncomfortable, and often quite painful to read decisions. And that's not a flaw of the book - in fact, it's the point. Uncovering Jonah's motivation, his deeply seated trauma, his codependency issues and his deeply broken sense of identity is, I would say, the thing this novel is most concerned about. And it does it well! It's, like, I mentioned earlier, a well-constructed arc that is believable and works quite well, with a very satisfying ending that doesn't feel unbelievable, either. Yet, it feels like watching a train wreck and that can be a good thing or a bad thing - here it mostly had me cringing, and gritting my teeth as it slowly unfolded in front of me, barely allowing time to breathe.
This and the fact that in the beginning, the book takes quite a while to build its momentum meant that Yes, Daddy was a difficult and often quite arduous read for me.
Yet, all this makes it sound as though I didn't appreciate or enjoy the book - I did. This book contains multitudes. Yes, Daddy is an incredibly visceral and unforgettable read. The complex characterisation, the intuiging story, and the writing style whis is sharp, precise, and gripping, make it well worth the read.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange of an honest review.


DNF.

This is a very DARK book. I knew that. But I thought I could stomach through the many, many trigger warnings for this, because it seemed to be an important story. Now, I know it IS an important story, and necessary, but I couldn't just get through some of the horrifying scenes on this.

DNF. This is definitely a case of me just not being the right reader for the book, so I'm going to stop here and refrain from writing a review that might hinder the best reader from picking this one up.

I feel like Yes, Daddy will be a fairly popular book upon it's release but unfortunately it just didn't work for me. This book definitely has that debut novel feeling in which it could have used some tighter editing and a clearer direction of where the author wanted this story to go. There are threads of a good story in these pages, but it never thrives in it's execution. And it just stumbles along to an ending that doesn't feel earned, and feels out of place from the direction of the story up to that point.

I never found anything redeeming about any of the characters in this novel, which made being invested in their stories a challenge. It was hard to root for the main character when his actions were not believable or authentic. Every other character besides the main character Jonah, feels hollow and very two dimensional. I wanted more life in these characters.

I'm sure many people will enjoy this dark, seedy LGBT thriller but I just was not one of them.

A little bit “You” by Caroline Kepnes plus a dash of “ The Talented Mr. Ripley” meets the Me Too movement. I couldn’t put it down.

Equal parts gripping and horrifying Yes, Daddy is one hell of a debut novel. This is not the kind of book one enjoys reading. In fact, most of the things that happen in this novel are horrific. Yet, thanks to Jonathan Parks-Ramage's superb writing skills, Yes, Daddy is the definition of unputdownable. The more alarming and distressing the story gets, the more impossible it was for me to tear my eyes away. Given the novel's explicit nature and painful subject matter, I would recommend it only to those who are willing/prepared to be disturbed by what they will read.

In the novel's prologue Jonah Keller, our protagonist, is a witness at a high-profile trial. One of the accused is Richard Shriver, a celebrated playwright and former boyfriend of Jonah. The story takes us back to 2009 and recounts the events that lead to that courtroom. Jonah is a twenty-five-year in badly of a break. He's an aspiring playwright who works as a waiter at a horrible restaurant where he is routinely bullied and groped by his boss. Jonah's relationship with his mother is strained, understandably given that his parents sent him to conversion therapy. In an attempt to improve his circumstances Jonah orchestrates a meeting with Richard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright in his fifties. Their relationship is intense, and soon Jonah becomes acquainted with the more disturbing aspects of Richard's nature.
When Richard invites Jonah to spend the summer with him in his Hampton estate, Jonah jumps at the opportunity. Richard's estate however proves to be the opposite of haven. Not only is Jonah forced to spend time with Richard's horrible friends who take any opportunity to toy with him (expect many painful dinner scenes) but Richard begins to exhibit some alarming behaviours.
Soon, Jonah begins to feel that something sinister is going on. Why does Richard's staff entirely consists of young and handsome men? Why do some have them have bruises? And what this all this talk about a basement? .....aaaaaaand here the story takes a nightmarish turn.

I will not say much else about the novel's plot as I do not wish to spoil other readers' experiences. Suffice to say: 'bad stuff' goes down but you will be unable to tear your eyes away from the page.
The novel ruthlessly explores the realities of being a victim of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Jonah's time at the estate irrevocably changes him. And yes, he, later on, makes some selfish choices, terrible even. But why should we expect victims to be paragons of virtue? If their trauma manifests itself in ugly or disturbing ways, what, they are no longer deserving of empathy?
Through Jonah's story Parks-Ramage challenges this kind of thinking and I really admire him for it. He also shows that movements like #metoo have their limits/flaws and how easy it is for anyone to play judge, jury and executioner on social media.

If I had to rate the first 40% of the novel it would have probably been close to a 5 star however a major character in this novel (who Jonah addresses as 'you') really didn't ring true to life (his character seemed to serve the role of a plot-device). And I also found certain other characters a bit OTT, so much so that they would have been at home in an episode of American Horror Story Psycho and I can't say that I believed in that much either. Lastly, towards the end, the narrative takes a direction that I wasn't too enthused with. By then I had grown a bit wary of seeing Jonah suffer and I just wanted him to be left alone.

All in all, I found this to be an edge-of-your-seat kind of read. I was immediately drawn in by the narrative's gothic undertones and won over by the story's nods to The Talented Mr. Ripley and Rebecca. The more I read the more perturbed I became. In spite of its cover this novel is dark, disquieting, upsetting, and by no means an easy or enjoyable read. Still, I found Parks-Ramage's prose captivating and I appreciated the way he combined an electrifying narrative with a thought-provoking commentary (on trauma, power, abuse, class, forgiveness, #metoo, the way the media treats victims of sexual violence). As debuts go this is an impressive one and I can't wait to see what Parks-Ramage has in store next

Yes, Daddy

A stunning debut novel, Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage, explores the use of sex as a weapon to yield power in the male guy community.

Jonah is a struggling playwright in NYC, moonlighting as a server at a hip restaurant, only getting by with the financial help of his mother. He manages to nab a date with his favorite playwright, the much older and wealthy Richard. Richard runs in a powerful circle, yet his personal life remains a mystery. He begins to bankroll Jonah’s lifestyle, creating a powerful shift in their relationship. He even goes as far to slap Jonah the night of his play’s opening night.

However, it isn’t until Jonah accepts an invitation to Richard’s Hampton’s compound that he realizes the depths of his depravity.

The layers of Yes, Daddy are hypnotizing. Exploring family dynamics, the church and it’s influence on sexuality, the failings of our court systems, this novel delivers on so many levels. Coupled with the #metoo movement, this book produces a gut punch of an ending. Rarely do I have physical and audible reactions to a book, Yes Daddy gave me a multitude of both.

Please be warned, while written with so much heart, this book is full of triggers. From rape to drug use to faith based abuse, this book does not shy away and therefore not for everyone.