Item: Margo's Got Money Troubles
Rating: 4.5
Author: Catherine

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Published by William Morrow & Company
Publication date: June 11, 2024
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Vacation Reading

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Margo is 19 and languishing at community college when she is swept into an affair with a married professor. She ends up pregnant and decides to have the baby. What follows in Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a story and characters that are frustrating, quirky, and endearing.

Let’s jump right into the frustrating. My pragmatic nature trampled my romantic side decades ago so a 19-year-old girl who’s decided college is not for her, but that a baby will give her something to do is quickly going to trigger my judge-y side. The trope of unplanned pregnancies in this day and age is one of my least favorite, but Margo goes ahead despite everyone she knows telling her it will ruin her life. With no more support than a small check from the professor’s mother to keep her quiet she brings her new son Bodhi home to the apartment she shares with three roommates and begins life as a single working mother.

This is just the entry point into a world of eccentric characters and plot points that would be frustrating if author Rufi Thorpe’s didn’t write them so well. In short order two of the roommates have moved out and Margo’s absentee father, a former WWE wrestler has moved in. Faced with the fact that no work is feasible without childcare she decides to stay home and starts an OnlyFans account—a pay-per-view streaming service for adults.

The trials and tribulations continue through the novel, but in the way of ordinary people and life. Mistakes are made, tempers lost, things go wrong, but throughout it all Thorpe keeps Margo real. She neither turns her into a saint or a whore; there’s no sugarcoating being a single mother with a high school education nor is there some magical bailout that solves all of her problems. Instead, Thorpe settles into the world of quirky and unexpected with ease and humor. The kind of humor that saves trauma from turning into tragedy. Yes, Margo’s got money troubles and she’ll continue to have them, but from them she builds a life rich in everything that matters.

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