Les Be Honest

I had high hopes for Les Be Honest (Pub. Date February 13, 2024) by Sarah Robinson, a multicultural queer lesbian romance by the author of Baby Bank, which I really enjoyed.

The story is told from the perspective of Yasmeen, a queer black millennial trust fund young adult with ADHD, who has just had to move to suburban Virginia because of her roommate’s marriage, While scoping out her new neighborhood, she gets the idea to open up a lesbian bar with a free hair salon in the back, in an empty storefront. The property manager, Tyler, is a white woman who lives in the penthouse suite because her father owns the building, and also has a true-crime podcast. They hit it off immediately.

But Tyler’s father is a hard-right lobbyist who funnels his money into anti-LGBTQ causes. So Yas’s idea of a lesbian bar and salon is not likely to get much traction with him unless Tyler is in on the idea. So Tyler becomes a partner in the business, and they “pretend” to be girlfriends as well. That’s not too difficult because of the chemistry they have, but Tyler isn’t really out to the public, and Yas has long since stopped dating women who aren’t yet out.

Yasmeen doesn’t understand how Tyler remains in contact with her father–how can she, when he doesn’t accept her queerness? Yas’s family has always accepted the fact that she’s a lesbian, and her father, a security consultant, believes in her lesbian bar business plan and approves using her trust fund to finance it.

Will they convince Tyler’s father to rent Yas the space? If not, what will they do? Will Yas be able to fulfill her latest project–the lesbian bar–that might be the one project that will keep her ADHD brain humming? And will Tyler ever be publicly out?

Maybe I expected too much. There’s nothing wrong with Les Be Honest, it’s a perfectly nice romance, but I had hoped that Robinson would more realistically portray the discussions that are likely to occur between two people in a multicultural (mixed-race) relationship. While Les Be Honest deals with Tyler’s complicated relationship with her father, Robinson failed to include any conflicts that might have arisen between the characters because of their different races. While Tyler takes Yas to primarily white spaces, there’s no discussion or acknowledgement of the anxiety Yasmeen might feel in those same spaces. So I felt it was a little superficial and wasn’t sure that the author was the best person to write from the perspective of Yasmeen.

But it was weight-neutral. There was little discussion of fatness or weight.