A romance attempting to tackle #MeToo misses the mark.
A local club owner helps a recently fired sous-chef get revenge on her boss.
Liv Papandreas puts up with a lot from her boss at Nashville’s hottest restaurant—Royce is verbally abusive and takes credit for his staff’s recipes—but the final straw is when she witnesses him sexually harassing and groping a hostess in his office. After Liv is fired, she vows to bring his abuse to light. Her unlikely ally is Braden Mack, her brother-in-law’s charmingly smarmy friend. Mack is outraged when he hears about Royce’s actions; he wonders why he never noticed the man’s predatory behavior, and he enlists the other men in his romance-reading book club to help Liv bring Royce to justice. Their shock at Royce's actions might strike readers as naïve; on the other hand, Liv and Mack’s decision to go after Royce without consulting lawyers or the police is both inexplicable and reckless. After an overly long setup, the revenge plot is put on hold to develop the wan romance between Liv and Mack. Neither of them trust emotional entanglements, so they agree to a no-strings affair while they use Mack’s superficial knowledge of romantic suspense to figure out how to bring Royce’s misdeeds to light. Adams (The Bromance Book Club, 2019, etc.) clearly intends for Royce to be a Harvey Weinstein–like figure: He threatens to end Liv’s career, orders his thugs to follow Liv and Mack, and pays off the many women he has harassed. Unfortunately, the tone of the novel reduces #MeToo to a madcap caper, including fart jokes, traffic jams, and macho posturing. The victims of Royce’s sexual harassment are used as a plot device, allowing Liv, Mack, and the other book club members to swoop in and save the day.
A romance attempting to tackle #MeToo misses the mark.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0611-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A funny, sexy page-turner that warns: Keep your friends close and their avatars closer.
A criminology professor uses a fake dating profile to flirt with her best friend in Lauren's (Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, 2018, etc.) latest.
Looking for a date to a commencement banquet at UC Santa Barbara, Millie Morris and her platonic friends Reid Campbell, Stephen “Ed” D’Onofrio, Alex Ramirez, and Christopher Hill decide to join a dating site. But when Millie and Reid have a one-night stand (parting ways early, making it a half-night stand), their feelings for each other start to interfere with their plans. Reid pursues two online matches, the first a pretty but bland woman named Daisy and the other a fascinating woman named Catherine whose face is obscured in her profile picture. Writing as Catherine, Millie opens up to Reid about all the things she’s been afraid to talk to him about in person—her home life, her past, and her true feelings for him. But when they start to get closer in real life, too, she realizes that her ruse may cost her both her friendship with Reid and any prospect of a relationship. Meanwhile, Reid is torn between Millie and her digital alter ego. With her split personality—aloof and sarcastic in person, honest and vulnerable online—Millie brings great tension to the book, even if her quirky obsession with serial killers is underutilized. Text messages headed with avatars and wrapped in conversation bubbles add a fun texture to the rapid-fire dialogue. Though the commencement banquet turns out to be little more than a footnote, it’s worth pulling an all-nighter to see if Reid and Millie will graduate from friends to lovers.
A funny, sexy page-turner that warns: Keep your friends close and their avatars closer.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9740-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
A delightfully sweet, funny, and heartbreaking ode to love stories, both onscreen and off-.
A movie-obsessed projectionist looks back at his relationship and wonders where it all went wrong in this debut from Nicholls.
Nick and Ellie meet under auspicious circumstances: at an election-viewing party the night that Barack Obama is chosen as the next president of the United States. Nick, who loves nothing more than films and works as a projectionist at a theater, instantly falls for Ellie and sees the entire movie of their relationship play out in his mind. Now it’s four years later, Obama is about to be elected president once again, and Ellie’s moved out of their apartment. Forlorn and desperate to figure out where it all went wrong, Nick retraces their entire relationship as the plot jumps back and forth among the night they met, the present day, and the challenges the couple faced along the way. Meanwhile, Nick finds himself falling further and further into despair as he loses his apartment, his parents move away, and his theater switches from film to digital, rendering his job obsolete. With his entire life in shambles, Nick must finally look inward to figure out why things with Ellie really didn’t work out. Nick tends to think in movie references, many of which are very clever, particularly an oft-remembered argument with Ellie about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Unlike in many books and movies with similar plots, Nicholls doesn’t treat his female character like the bad guy for stomping on the male character’s heart and ego. Instead, he examines her point of view as she reminds Nick that life is more than just movies—or, at least, life doesn’t turn out like the movies sometimes, and Nick may have to make some big changes if he wants a Hollywood ending. Their relationship has cinematic highs and believable lows, with fully rounded characters and smart, snappy, romantic comedy–worthy dialogue. Nick’s and Ellie’s real lives aren’t a movie, but as Nicholls tells it, they might have a happily-ever-after anyway.
A delightfully sweet, funny, and heartbreaking ode to love stories, both onscreen and off-.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2687-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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