One of Entertainment Weekly's "20 Best New Books to Read in May" *One of Bustle's "Debut Books to Look Forward to This Spring and Summer" *One of Electric Literature's "27 Debuts to Look Forward to in the First Half of 2021" *One of NewNowNext's "17 Exciting Queer Books to Savor This Summer" *One of the Advocate's "5 Most Exciting LGBTQ+ Debut Books to Read This Summer" *One of Men's Health's "25 Best LGBTQ+ Books to Read This Pride Month" *Included on Lambda Literary's "May's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Literature" —
Included on Goodreads' "9 Books that Goodreads Editors Highly Recommend" *Included on Entertainment Weekly's "Pride 2021 Must List" *Included on Goodreads' "2021 Pride Reading List" —
"Yes, Daddy is the kind of story that sticks with you and refuses to leave. Jonathan Parks-Ramage has written a gut-churning, heart-wrenching, blockbuster of a first novel. Deeply queer and deeply human, it is a book that describes what it means to be broken apart in trauma and grief and what it takes to be painfully, carefully stitched back together again. Parks-Ramage is an extraordinary new talent and Yes, Daddy is truly something special." — Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
“A dark and aching account, where the treachery of powerful men preys on the bodies and minds of the young. The excesses of a Hamptons summer cannot cover up the truth of how greed and need birth abuses so visceral as to touch the surreal. Parks-Ramage takes a reader into the fiery, unblinking sights of a tortured beast.” — Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
"Jonathan Parks-Ramage has written an incredibly tender, yet fearless, novel that reminds us of what it means to err, to be forgiven, to forgive, and to live. Yes, Daddy is a gem of a debut." — De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills
"Yes, Daddy is a deeply humane, complex account of public and private trauma in the age of fake news. Ultimately, this is a story of redemption in an era when grace seems impossible. Deeply familiar yet always surprising and—most important—well-written, this is a superb debut." — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
“Dark, twisted, and tightly plotted, Yes, Daddy is a to-the-minute thriller about sex, violence, and power. Sure to disturb and enthrall, Jonathan Parks-Rampage's shocker of a debut was made for the screen and for our cultural moment.” — Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
“Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s dazzling novel Yes, Daddy deftly uses desire and violence to explode the allure of New York power gays. Yet Parks-Ramage has more on his mind than a rarefied milieu; as Yes, Daddy reaches its virtuosic conclusion, it’s his bruised narrator’s journey to redemption that elevates the book to a kind of ecstasy. A piercing new addition to the contemporary queer canon.” — Sam Lansky, author of Broken People
"Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s debut novel is a queer gothic thriller you can’t afford to miss. It centers on Jonah, who spends his days waiting tables and dreaming of making it in the theater world. His love affair with Richard, an award-winning playwright, may lead Jonah to the success he craves — but a summer spent in his lover’s eerie Hamptons mansion could change everything." — Bustle, "Debut Books to Look Forward to This Spring and Summer"
"If you’re in the mood for a dark, gothic (and scary!) romance, look for Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage. It’s a novel about a man who schemes to meet what he thinks is Mr. Wealthy and Right but he learns when he’s finally invited to Mr. Right’s mansion that something is very, very wrong. You can take a book like this on vacation but don’t take it to bed with you." — Washington Blade, "Spring Reads"
"A riveting queer novel, Yes, Daddy takes a critical look at the way power imbalances play out in relationships." — Electric Literature, "27 Debuts to Look Forward to in the First Half of 2021"
"Empathetic. . . A story that offers all extremes, from verisimilitude to despair and from a lust for revenge to a longing for home. Fear settles over the reader as they wait for the next blow, making Jonah's story akin to that of the victim in Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State." — Booklist (starred review)
"[An] emotionally complex debut . . . both erotic and chilling." — Kirkus Reviews
"A heart-racing and heartbreaking thriller." — Goodreads, "9 Books that Goodreads Editors Highly Recommend"
"An unnerving examination of the relationship between Jonah, a young writer struggling in New York City, and Richard, an incredibly wealthy, much-lauded middle-aged playwright . . . In Yes, Daddy, Parks-Ramage deftly hops among multiple genres to spin an unsettling tale of abuse, betrayal, and atonement." — Public Libraries Online
"Yes, Daddy serves to remind readers that sexual assault is not an issue that only straight people face . . . This is a knockout debut, one of the most exciting of the year. Will it make you uncomfortable? Yes, Daddy. Should you still absolutely read it? Yes, Daddy." — The Advocate, "5 Most Exciting LGBTQ+ Debut Books to Read This Summer"
"Page-turning . . . Parks-Ramage suffuses his narrative with a rich atmosphere, somewhere between the Gothic and The Great Gatsby." — Lambda Literary
2021-03-03
A young gay writer’s dream relationship turns into an abusive nightmare.
Parks-Ramage’s emotionally complex debut is narrated by Jonah, a young New Yorker determined to forget his oppressive, conservative upbringing. As Jonah was growing up in suburban Illinois, his pastor father forced him into gay conversion therapy, which only motivated him to escape the Midwest. But Gotham has left him broke and stalled his post–MFA dreams of becoming a playwright. Lonely, needy, and a touch scheming, he insinuates himself with Richard, a wealthy and accomplished gay playwright. Richard draws Jonah into his inner circle, inviting him for a stay at his Hamptons compound. It soon becomes clear, though, that Jonah is just one of numerous handsome and exploitable young men Richard has deceitfully roped into a form of indentured servitude; humiliations abound, from violent, bullying rages to drug-induced rape. When Richard is finally brought to trial, as we learn in the prologue, Jonah is too frightened to follow through on his plan to testify against him. It seems at first that Parks-Ramage has given the plot away early, but the closing chapters deepen the story, not just about Richard, but about Jonah’s struggle to deal with multiple betrayals and abuses along with his callowness. The novel’s title most directly refers to Jonah and Richard’s sub-dom relationship, but it’s also concerned with multiple father figures and their power dynamics, including Jonah’s father and God. Jonah’s first-person narration gives the book a confessional feel while his shifts to second person, addressing another of Richard’s victims, add a note of regret and complicity. “The things we worship eat us alive,” Richard says at one point, and the novel smartly showcases just how corrosive idolatry is.
A well-formed coming-of-age story, both erotic and chilling.