3.5 stars rounded up.

Natalie is a struggling art student in Manhattan. She lives in Brooklyn with two roommates that she doesn’t get along with, barely able to pay her rent and other bills. She has no money for food and loses her job. She’s desperate. When she notices that her art school classmate has designer clothes and a great apartment in Chelsea, she asks her how. That’s when her friend tells her about being a Sugar Baby. There’s a website where older men or Sugar Daddies will meet younger woman, Sugar Babies, and pay them for dates and other things if they are interested. Although she is skeptical and a little turned off by the idea, Nat decides to just go on a few meet-ups for $500 each so she can pay her bills.

Nat meets Gabe through the Sugar Babies website, and they immediately hit it off. Gabe is a corporate lawyer who has a wife and daughter in the Hamptons, but an apartment in the city so it’s easy to make these Sugar Babies believe he’s divorced when in fact he isn’t. He lies to Nat as well and asks her to make their arrangement official – regular dinners and Broadway shows throughout the week and sleepovers, maybe even a getaway.

Nat develops feelings for Gabe and believes that he has them for her as well. When he decides to end their arrangement, Nat becomes obsessed with him. She’s will do anything to get him back, even befriend his 18 year old daughter. Things take a turn for the worse when Gabe is murdered and Nat is arrested. She doesn’t remember shooting him in the face, but she was in a downward spiral, drinking out of control, after he ended things. Could she have murdered him?

The Arrangement by Robyn Harding is an interesting concept. I didn’t know much about the Sugar Baby lifestyle prior to reading this except what I’ve seen on Law & Order: SVU! I think that I would have liked this book better if the characters weren’t all so unlikable. Nat started off okay. She seemed like any other struggling college kid, but then her character became a complete psycho. Gabe was just an awful person. He was misogynistic and a complete narcissist. He had no care for the Sugar Babies that he paid for. They were another business transaction for him, and he didn’t care if he hurt them or his family at all.

I had one other big issue with this book. When using Facebook, if you block someone you can’t see their profile, but Nat was able to see her ex-boyfriend’s profile even though she blocked him. The author should have researched better and hopefully will fix this before the book is released.

Overall, I found the story interesting and the author definitely kept me wanting to read more. It was a hard book to put down. I did figure out the big twist, but it didn’t make me want to stop reading. I just wish I felt more for the main characters.

Thank you NetGalley and Gallery Books for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.