Book review: “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” tells a story of modern love and success

The cover and title of Margo’s Money Troubles don’t quite convey the wild journey readers will experience when they open this new novel by Rufi Thorpe. There’s a reason Apple TV secured the rights to a series starring Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning before the novel was even published. This is a completely original novel.

A quick plot summary: Margo gets pregnant by her community college professor at 19, has the baby, drops out of school, and discovers OnlyFans, where she posts for money and rates the NSFW pictures subscribers send her, giving them each a Pokémon lookalike. But wait—there’s more! Her father, Jinx, is a famous pro wrestler who’s now retired. He actually introduces her to OnlyFans and helps her grow her audience, using many of the same techniques that made him a star in the ring.

Meanwhile, her mother Shyanne, who also gave birth to Margo at a young age and now spends a lot of time changing her appearance to attract a man who can provide for her, begs Margo to stop selling pictures of her body for money because “no man will marry you now.”

And as if that wasn’t strange enough, Thorpe also exaggerates the book’s voice. Margo is always the narrator, but often switches from third to first person because, “It’s so much easier to have compassion for the Margo that existed then than to try to explain how and why I did all the things I did.”

It’s a book that grabs and holds your attention. Who doesn’t want to hear the end of a story that starts with a baby shower that includes a cake shaped like a large penis? It’s full of laughs and also contains astute insights about celebrity, social media, and what success even means these days.

Despite all of her questionable life choices, Margo is someone readers can root for, and the love story at the heart of the novel—between Margo and one of her OnlyFans—seems entirely plausible in the internet age.

It would be unfair to give away the book’s final two sentences, and damn any reader who skips to them now, but Thorpe brings her remarkable story to a poetic and profound conclusion.

AP Book Reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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