Review: The Dating Game

The Dating Game by Kiley Roache
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: deportation, slut-shaming, objectification of women.

Following up on her topical and engrossing debut in last year's Frat Girl, Kiley Roache now gives us a second Warren University novel that she began working on while a student at Stanford, the obvious real-world inspiration for Warren. Reading this one, I feel that this might have been an earlier manuscript that she put on the back burner while getting Frat Girl out there and didn't quite incubate as well as she should have, but The Dating Game is still pretty appropriately topical - if oftentimes maddening to the point where it made me want to smash my head against the wall.


While Frat Girl was a longer story with a single POV, Roache crowds this shorter, only about 300-page book with three POVs - one of whom is my obvious favorite. Roberto, by far the least privileged of the three, coming from a working-class Mexican family in Oakland and having suffered the sting of ICE deporting his mother a few years ago. Reading this on the weekend when ICE was conducting raids as ordered from on high by Agent Orange himself, it really was a terrifying coincidence.

The other two POVs are ones that I'm less enthused about getting into, though. Sara, she's a driven young woman, but when even the dust jacket calls her "type A," that immediately made me want to run screaming. I grew up around type A people all the time; I do not jell well with them at all. But she's a damn sight better than Braden, a hunk of stale straight white male privilege who coasts by on his good looks and basically sets up the dating app that's supposed to be his, Sara's, and Roberto's class project as a giant exercise in the objectification of women. I mean, how else are we supposed to see the very premise of that app, rating everyone you swipe left or right on? Not to mention when the app finally goes online, everyone stresses about their rankings, and there's at least one scene of a guy getting dumped and then accusing his erstwhile date of providing sexual favors for upvotes. And me, all I can think about is how my own dating app experiences have been nothing but failure, failure, failure - and if I were on Perfect10, I'd be unranked for sure no matter how many likes I give, because I'd never get any likes back. Or dates. Or anything, really. Because unlike Braden who's a massive jerkoff and that's why he's still single at the start of this book, I'm not attractive enough to make people not notice my social awkwardness.

But I digress.

At least the book has a happy ending, which feels incredibly cathartic after all the boneheadedness that came before it. Though I'm not gonna lie, I still feel like Frat Girl was Roache's better book by far.

View all my reviews