Review: Dirty Roulette

Stephy M. Marie, Dirty Roulette (Kindle 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238208053-dirty-roulette

The early years of college are a lot of fun, sometimes. But they can be a stage for some painful experiences.
Ryder is still trying to get over the night he saw his girlfriend of 3 years Brittni f***ing the college a***ole Brody. Brody is the dude all the gals go for, and as is often the case in an age group where people don’t yet really know who they are, he’s a piece of work.
Ryder has seen the casual s**, the jealousies, the breakups, the vendettas, and he’s determined to protect his sister Charlie, who is barely eighteen.
Then one night a party gets out of control. What starts as a silly game of Strip Poker ends up wreaking havoc on the kids. The wrong people end up having s** together, things are posted on the internet that shouldn’t have been, and their fragile, pressured society is fractured.
Everything is first-person present tense, alternating chapters between POV characters—Ryder, Payton and Charlie. This gives intimacy to the reader. The writing style is unique. The plotline works in today’s huge role of texting and social media. They all seem barely out of high school maturity-wise, and their emotions are usually turned up to High—shame, jealousy, desire, betrayal. The parents all seem to have their own dysfunction going on, so the young people have to work out their social problems by themselves.
It’s worth making a little list as you go along to keep in mind whose head we’re hopping into—Who is whose sister? Who has the hots for whom? Who dumped whom? Who f***ed whom, and who knows about it? Old folks like me struggle to catch all the young streettalk.
The characters are interesting and multi-layered. I love stories like this, where one event ends up having ramifications for each of the characters. It reminded me how painful it was to be young.