I was looking forward to reading Helpless because I really like Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and grew to like Luckiest Girl Alive, but I don’t know what the heck this is. I am so disappointed with this novel because it is not at all what I expected from someone who wrote such an emotionally devastating and thoughtful story like Bright Young Women.

Helpless is about a woman named Faye Heron who is a successful producer and writer, but whose success is dependent on her marriage to her husband and producing partner, who she is thinking about leaving. Faye is famous for an award-winning TV episode she wrote and starred in based on her relationship with her college boyfriend, Henry, a relationship characterized by his controlling behaviour and their abusive sex life that Faye enjoyed and has been fantasizing about since they broke up twelve years earlier. When Faye’s former professor and mentor dies, Faye and Henry are reunited at their old college campus, and even though Faye can tell he is angry about the TV episode she wrote, she still invites him to her hotel room for a drink. And then she wakes at Henry’s family’s remote mountain cabin and realizes that he has drugged and kidnapped her. But why? Is he punishing her for the TV episode, or is there something more going on? As Faye tries to figure things out, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Henry’s intense and vicious behaviour.

Now, I am not interested in kink shaming anyone, but this book just doesn’t do it for me. One of the characters in the book, a female producer, says that women have rape fantasies, and I’m just like, excuse me? Are there women out there who actually fantasize about being raped? Or is rough, non-vanilla sex just being conflated with rape? If a woman enjoys and consents to sexual activity where she isn’t in control and might even feel “helpless”, it is not rape. But calling it a “rape fantasy” fits the narrative of actual rapists who use “no means yes” as an excuse to sexual assault women. I am trying to figure out why Knoll wrote this novel, and once you learn the reason why Faye is unhappy with her marriage, I think the point of Helpless is that society needs to stop shaming women for having sexual desires and for wanting to be sexually fulfilled in their relationships, even if those desires involve being spanked or whipped. So, if a woman wants to read a smutty book like Helpless that’s okay, but if a woman finds it too smutty, that’s okay too.

I will give Knoll credit for this book being well written, though. The cover of this book looks like something Freida McFadden would have written, but Knoll has a way with words that I can’t help but notice and be impressed with.

My feelings toward Faye are ambivalent. I don’t think she is a bad person, but she is not a good person either. Her heady desire to be railed by Henry makes her cocky and stupid, which I found maddening because even when she realizes that her life actually is in danger, she still wants Henry. The guy is a giant red flag who is either going to kill her or get her killed, but to each their own, I guess. Even if Helpless had toned down the aggressively uncomfortable relationship between Faye and Henry, I probably still would not have liked this book because the “mind-bending” twist, which I did not see coming, was derivative and because I generally do not like ambiguous endings.