After reading a lot of intense fantasy books, I always find myself drifting towards a good romance book, and I was definitely in the mood for The Intimacy Experiment! It’s technically book 2 of The Roommate series, but you don’t need to read the first book to enjoy this one – it can be read as a standalone!
Title: The Intimacy Experiment
Author: Rosie Danan
Series: The Roommate #2
Genres: Romance
I loved reading The Roommate last year and was so excited to learn there would be a sequel/spin off featuring one of the side characters from The Roommate, Naomi. You do not need to read The Roommate to read The Intimacy Experiment as it stands on its own, but you will be spoiled for how Roommate ends, so beware if you planned to read that!
I love a sex positive romance book, especially sex positive for women in particular! Naomi is one of the co-founders of Shameless, an online website that has tutorials on, you guessed it – sex, specifically focusing on pleasure for women. Naomi has some experience in this field as she was an adult entertainer before the website took over as her main duties. She loves the site, but wants to expand into teach seminars about sex in real life to people face to face. Unfortunately, most “teaching” institutions aren’t open to sex education.
She meets Ethan at a teaching conference, and he offers her a classroom to teach people – as part of trying to grow an audience for his synagogue, as he is a rabbi. Naomi (reluctantly) accepts, and the story goes from there.
This story was different than I expected, in a good way! This focuses a lot on the Jewish religion along with sex positivity, and how the two can go hand in hand. Disclaimer, I am not Jewish and I feel like I learned a bit about the Jewish faith in reading this book. This is first and foremost a romance book, and it was incredible to see the Jewish faith as a main feature. If you asked me offhand what my favorite story was featuring Jewish characters, I would point to Rachel Lynn Soloman since reading her books this year, but before that? -crickets- And that shouldn’t be the case.
I truly loved Naomi as a character, she’s a badass bitch who knows what she wants and how to get it, and she will fight for it. We see a more vulnerable side of her in this book, and thats ok too – you can’t be tough 24/7, its ok to let your guard down.
We also have Ethan’s POV in this book and I enjoyed seeing him fight the board of his synagogue and explain why a lecturer like Naomi would be good for their congregation and he wanted her lecture series on Modern Intimacy to be heard by as many people as possible.
For a romance book, there wasn’t a lot of actual romance/sex as I had expected. That’s why my rating is lower than I expected it to be – there is a lot of talk about intimacy and sex positivity, but there wasn’t much sex on the page until the last quarter of the book and even then it felt brief.
Overall I thought this was a fantastic story and I raced through it, not wanting to put it down and needed to know what would come next. I highly recommend this one!
This book is told in two POV’s: Naomi and Ethan’s. I really enjoyed the fact there were two narrators. Dual narrators are always a bonus in my opinion and I thought this one worked really well as an audiobook. I enjoyed both narrators and would gladly listen to them again.
I ended up on 2.5x speed by the end, as I found this one easy to listen to.
My Rating:
I’m giving this one a 3.5 star rounded up to 4 on Goodreads. My only wish is there was more of the romance aspect of this book, as the build up took a long time. I would recommend this if you’re looking for a slow burn romance and especially if you’re looking for a story with Jewish characters and strong talks of Jewish faith – both the losing of it, and finding it again.
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