Review: Taking the Lead by Cecilia Tan

This is a book that I feel like had potential, but there were just too many things going on for me to really get invested and enjoy it.

Ricki and Gwen are sisters with a complicated inheritance, one that requires that they run a secret BDSM club. The club and the secrets that come with it hover in the story, but are really a very small part of it. The core of the story is Ricki and the ways she is handling herself as a 24 year old heiress/MBA graduate trying to make her way in the world.

As we watch Ricki navigate her new world, we see her butt heads with several patriarchal figures including her father, the family lawyer, and her boss. She is also trying to figure out her super-hot and sexy relationship with Axel, the front man for a band.

Ricki was a hard character for me to relate to. On one hand, she needed to be pushy and abrasive, but she also was trying to walk a line of being deferential to people in power. She was incredibly strong, but also very fearful. At times she was adventurous and then timid. I never really got a good grasp for who she was. Axel was equally hard to get a read on – he was sexually aggressive with Ricki, but acted like a lost puppy outside of their sexual encounters.

I don’t know if this is a case of this being the wrong book for me or something else, but I really felt like there were too many story lines going for one book. I think things would have worked much better if the focus had been narrower.