Review of "Rent-A-M.A.N." by Micky O'Brady

​Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

Micky O'Brady always delivers!

We’ve reviewed enough of O’Brady’s work by now to recognize a pattern: she has a tremendous knack for coming up with fascinating concepts and then finding something much deeper underneath them.

Playing with #Fire, which earned an outstanding 95/100, combined high-school drama, social-media obsession, cyberbullying, mental health, romance, and professional wrestling into one wildly ambitious story. Time Warped, which scored 94/100, threw a teenage heroine into a sprawling sci-fi conflict involving time travel, warfare, political manipulation, prejudice, and the uncomfortable realization that the people you have been taught to call the enemy may have their own legitimate side of the story. Then Long Division, at 93+/100, took the simple fantasy of wishing irritating people out of existence and transformed it into a disturbing examination of anger, moral certainty, power, and what happens when a person loses the ability to tolerate disagreement.

Well, Rent-A-M.A.N. takes perhaps O’Brady’s funniest and most immediately amusing concept yet, then turns it into something far more meaningful, emotional, and impactful than we ever expected.

So, where do we even begin? Because this book really disarms you. It makes you think it's going to be some cheesy romantic comedy, then becomes something much more than that. It takes quite a turn!

The tone of this book shifts from lighthearted to surprisingly more serious.

It's not quite dark or grim, but it definitely ventured further toward that route. No, there's no abuse, no murders going on in the background (this isn't a Kay Brooks mystery-romance novel), and the diagnosis isn't exactly terminal, but the book really takes on a different shade of bright, a much more dramatic one. It goes from being like a light, heartwarming Hallmark Channel-esque feature to becoming a lot more like a Lifetime movie... An overly long and somewhat overbooked one. Well, another way of saying "overly long" is "methodical." Another way of saying overbooked is, well... "complex."

But going back to what we were saying earlier... that shift in tone and direction--that dramatic turn-- is really a double-edged sword. A part of us really wanted some good laughs, slapstick humor, silliness, and romantic shenanigans, like the ones we got in Peg Unhinged or Wrecked by You in recent contests. The book was really built up like it was going that route.

The interactions between Sadie Evans (the main protagonist) and her mother that kick off this book are delightfully, whimsically charming and funny. It reminded us of the BFF relationship between Millie and her mom in Worldwide Crush by Kristin Nilsen, a book which we loved. In fact, a lot of the early portions of this book present Sadie in a similar light to Millie: she overthinks everything, she's somewhat obsessive when it comes to being infatuated with guys (one in particular), she's naive at times, and she shares a really special relationship with her mom.

That's one of the good things about starting a book out with a lighter, more comedic tone: it raises the mood, which can likewise raise the reader's perception and opinion of the protagonist. And what's there not to like about Sadie? She's so darn relatable.

She sets her Aura voice to British just so it can pronounce "Mother" funny.
And when she gets a world-shattering medical diagnosis, she thinks all the thoughts we would think, asks all the questions we would ask, and feels all the feelings we would feel.

And she arguably expresses those feelings the way that most people probably would in her shoes: with I KNEW IT / I TOLD YOU SO / THOSE LAZY LITTLE OVEREDUCATED S**S WERE WRONG! energy.

Perhaps we're rushing too far ahead, so let's backtrack a little, and all of that might start to make sense. We have to talk about the stud muffin who is Max, after all.

As we alluded to before, the whole thing starts when Sadie's mother, Gloria, casually informs her that she has "rented a man." Yes, it sounds exactly as questionable as Sadie thinks it sounds. However, Rent-A-M.A.N. is not that kind of business. M.A.N. stands for Middle-Aged Nerd, and the company's purpose is simultaneously ridiculous, hilarious, depressing, and painfully believable: women can hire men to accompany them into situations where another man might otherwise dismiss, talk over, overcharge, or simply refuse to listen to them. Gloria discovers the service after a frustrating trip to a hardware store, and the company's own website essentially acknowledges the absurdity of the situation with the wonderfully self-aware attitude of, "We're not proud this service needs to exist, but here we are."

Gloria, being Gloria, decides her daughter could use the same kind of assistance at an auto-repair appointment. Sadie is understandably less than thrilled. She knows cars well enough to handle herself, doesn't appreciate her mother meddling, and certainly does not want some random middle-aged dude hovering over her shoulder like a male chaperone sent to validate every sentence that comes out of her mouth.

Except the man who shows up isn't middle-aged. And he certainly isn't what Sadie was picturing.

Enter Max Simmons, whom Sadie almost immediately compares to Timothee Chalamet. He's young, tall, ridiculously attractive, has dark curls, striking blue eyes, and is apparently the one exception to the company's age requirement. Max jokingly calls himself the "un-M.A.N.", as in the "Underage Middle-Aged Nerd." Sadie's brain, meanwhile, immediately starts malfunctioning because the humiliating experience of having her mother rent her a man has somehow become substantially more humiliating now that said rented man is hot. To be honest, this got some eye rolls from us, but it's fine.

Thankfully, Max isn't some macho know-it-all who marches into the repair shop and starts speaking for her. That's actually one of the things we immediately liked about him. He assumes Sadie can handle herself and basically tells her to do her thing while he stands by as backup. When questions arise over the work her car supposedly needs, Max doesn't hijack the conversation. He simply helps make sure the mechanic explains and substantiates what he's recommending. That little distinction turns out to be incredibly important because Rent-A-M.A.N. isn't really about men rescuing helpless women. It's about what happens when somebody who already knows what they're talking about needs another person in the room just to make everyone else listen.

And Max notices something else while he's around Sadie: she's in pain. Sadie has been dealing with mysterious medical problems for years, particularly recurring bouts of severe chest pain and difficulty breathing. She's been shuffled between doctors, specialists, tests, and explanations without anyone ever seeming to step back and look at the whole picture. Anxiety. Menstrual pain. Dehydration. Various possibilities have been floated around, but Sadie has reached the point where the uncertainty itself has become part of her normal life.

This is where Max reveals that he isn't merely some attractive nerd-for-hire who happens to know about cars. He's actually a doctor, specifically a fourth-year emergency-medicine resident at Redwood Coast Medical Center. And when Sadie explains how many doctors she's seen and how long she's been dealing with these symptoms, Max asks one of those questions that sounds painfully obvious in retrospect: Has anyone ever looked at all of these symptoms together? Well... apparently not.

Max encourages Sadie to return to her doctor and, true to the entire philosophy behind Rent-A-M.A.N., goes with her. Again, he doesn't burst through the door, slap his medical degree onto the table, and start ordering everybody around. He asks questions. He nudges the conversation in directions that had previously been overlooked. Most importantly, he helps Sadie articulate what she has been trying to tell people for years.
And then, after all that time, somebody finally finds something.

Imaging suggests intrathoracic endometriosis, meaning tissue associated with endometriosis may be affecting areas inside Sadie's chest. Her reaction is fascinating because she's simultaneously terrified and almost euphoric. She obviously doesn't want something to be wrong with her, but after years of wondering whether she's exaggerating, imagining things, being overly sensitive, or simply doomed to live like this forever, there is also tremendous relief in hearing, "We found something." A specialist later tells her that the scans strongly point toward endometriosis and, perhaps even more importantly, tells Sadie something she has desperately needed to hear: she has options. And that changes her.

Sadie's understandable anger over the whole ordeal eventually spills onto the Internet. If she spent nearly a decade trying to get somebody to take her symptoms seriously, how many other people are going through the exact same thing? How many have been told it's anxiety? How many have been brushed off because they're young, female, emotional, overweight, underweight, stressed, menstruating, or whatever other convenient explanation happens to come first?

So Sadie does what a lot of us do when we're frustrated, angry, and in pain: she starts writing. What begins as an emotional outlet gradually grows into ItsNotJustAnxiety, a medical-advocacy blog where people share experiences of feeling dismissed or unheard. Max becomes an important part of that project, helping Sadie understand the medical side while she brings the communication, storytelling, and marketing skills. Their work eventually develops into the HEARD approach, a framework built around asking questions, understanding what has actually been ruled out, requesting a concrete plan, and documenting what happened. What starts as Sadie's very personal frustration begins turning into something much larger: a community of people trying to become better advocates for themselves without treating every doctor as the enemy.

Of course, there's also the fact that Sadie is becoming increasingly, hopelessly, hilariously attracted to Max. And we can't exactly blame her. He's attentive without being suffocating, confident without constantly trying to prove how smart he is, and he actually remembers the little things Sadie tells him. Their relationship gradually moves from awkward flirting and medical conversations into something considerably more intimate, while Gloria is busy having some romantic developments of her own.

But underneath all of that is another much more painful part of Sadie's life: Sarah, her best friend, who died young after a medical emergency. Sarah's death hangs over Sadie throughout the novel, sometimes quietly in the background and sometimes much more directly, and it gives her obsession with being heard a significance that goes well beyond her own diagnosis. Sadie knows what it's like to feel dismissed as a patient, but she also knows what it's like to lose someone and spend the rest of your life wondering whether anything could have been done differently.

And that's about as far as we're willing to go without stepping directly onto one of the book's biggest land mines. Let's just say that O'Brady eventually brings Sadie's health, her advocacy work, her relationship with Max, Sarah's death, and the culture of the medical system crashing together in a way that substantially changes what kind of book we thought we were reading. What started with Sadie's mom renting her a hot nerd to accompany her to the mechanic eventually becomes a story about medical bias, grief, trust, accountability, professional hierarchy, and perhaps most importantly, what it actually means to listen to someone before deciding you already know their story.

Like we said before, we didn't expect this apparent romantic comedy to become The Logistics of Survial by Lis Richardson or When Women Get Sick by Rebecca Bloom, non-fiction books which essentially share the same message: how people (especially female patients) need to advocate for themselves, get a second/third/fouth opinion, do their own research, and insist their symptoms be taken seriously rather than being ignored or dismissed.

And that's really where Rent-A-M.A.N. becomes something much more interesting than its title suggests. The whole Rent-A-M.A.N. concept is initially a joke about sexism in places like hardware stores, banks, dealerships, and auto shops. But O'Brady gradually takes that same joke and asks a much more uncomfortable question: What happens when not being listened to has consequences considerably more serious than paying too much for a brake job?

For Sadie, those consequences are years of pain, uncertainty, frustration, and wondering whether she can even trust what her own body is telling her. So there is something genuinely satisfying about the moment when Dr. Rickman looks at Sadie's scans and essentially tells her, Yes, something is actually wrong. Yes, we believe you. And yes, there are things we can do about it. After years of uncertainty, hearing that she has options nearly brings Sadie to tears.

That's one of the things we really appreciated about the book: O'Brady doesn't simplify the issue into "doctors bad, patients good." Max is a doctor. Dr. Rickman is a doctor. There are medical professionals in this story who listen, explain themselves, reconsider possibilities, and genuinely want their patients to improve. Rickman even points out that doctors can become frustrated when patients ignore medical advice, which is an important little acknowledgement that communication problems can travel in both directions.

The problem is what happens when somebody becomes so confident in an assumption that they stop listening altogether. And that idea expands far beyond Sadie's diagnosis. It becomes the foundation of ItsNotJustAnxiety, then HEARD, then essentially the philosophical backbone of the entire novel. The book repeatedly comes back to the difference between disagreeing with someone and dismissing them. A doctor saying "no" isn't automatically refusing to listen. A patient asking for another explanation isn't automatically attacking the doctor's expertise. In fact, one of the more mature things about Sadie's growing online community is that readers begin reminding one another of exactly that distinction: a second opinion isn't an attack, and an unwanted medical answer isn't necessarily evidence that somebody ignored you.

That's a surprisingly nuanced message for a book that begins with a woman freaking out because the hot guy her mom rented for her looks like Timothee Chalamet.

And, incidentally, O'Brady herself is a pediatrician, which makes the direction of the story especially interesting. Her author's bio identifies her as both a physician and novelist, and Rent-A-M.A.N. spends a great deal of time looking at medicine from both sides of the examination room. Sadie knows what it feels like to be the patient who isn't believed, while Max understands what medicine looks like from within a complicated professional system where doctors themselves operate under hierarchies, rules, pressures, and limitations.

Now, that's all well and good, but there's something else about this book that kinda got to us. Max is too perfect. He's like the idealized image of a man: a handsome doctor with "six-pack! No, an eight-pack!" abs, gorgeous blue eyes, dark curls, a killer smile, and apparently enough physical attractiveness to cause Sadie's hormones to file for overtime. Seriously, there is so much simping and lusting in this book. We get it. And that's perhaps the problem. We already get it. We don't have to be reminded how hot Max is (or how attracted Sadie is to him) every five minutes.

Even the misunderstanding (which you can see a mile away) ends up painting Max in a more positive light, if that were even possible. The man is portrayed like an angel on earth.

With that said, at least Max is a good guy. Heck, he's a great guy. The book isn't glamorizing and highlighting some jerk. He's not some controlling, abusive, possessive person like male leads in some romance novels. He does the right thing 99.9% of the time.

He's someone you'd want your daughter to date.

Or maybe your mom.

Another thing we couldn't quite shake with this book is how it shifts focus so many times. At first, we thought it was going to be romantic comedy featuring a mother and daughter figuring out slice-of-life drama, pursuing separate dudes. Then we thought it was going to be a medical drama. Then it became about blogging and the potential impact of our online presence (similar to the author's other word, Playing with #Fire). Then it becomes about a friend's death long ago. Then it becomes about one institution suing Sadie to protect its skin, causing her to lose subscribers and sponsorships. Then it becomes about what really happened to Sarah all those years ago. Then it becomes about Max's backstory.

Yes, all these things kinda tie together, but we couldn't help but feel whiplash throughout this book.

With that said, this is still an above-average romance novel that happens to take on so many other topics and issues.

Check it out on Amazon!