After Tiffy breaks up with her boyfriend, she is in desperate need of a new place to live. Leon, a palliative care nurse, is short on cash so he advertises for a roommate to share his flat. Since Leon works nights, he and Tiffy come to an arrangement – Tiffy will have the apartment in the evenings and overnight and Leon will have the apartment during the day. The only catch is that they have to share the bed. What could go wrong?
I thought the premise of this book was odd at first. I wasn’t sure how the arrangement was going to work out and how the characters were going to deal with everything. Honestly, it’s probably not something that I would ever be comfortable doing, but it worked out well for Tiffy and Leon and since this is a romantic comedy, everything works out in the end.
I really liked the way Tiffy and Leon got to know each other by leaving post-it notes around the apartment. Since they are never home at the same time, and they’ve never met, the only way for them to communicate is through the notes. It started off with Tiffy asking Leon to leave the toilet seat down and then morphed into rambling conversations where they just talked about anything on their minds.
The book is told from alternating points of view from Tiffy and Leon. Unfortunately, I didn’t really care for Leon’s chapters, mainly because I disliked the way they were written. Leon’s chapters did not use any quotes around the dialogue and he rarely spoke/thought in complete sentences so it was just really choppy. I found Leon’s POV difficult to read and the different writing styles made it jarring to switch from Tiffy to Leon.
When I picked this book up, I thought it would be a lighthearted novel about 2 people and the antics they undergo while sharing an apartment. But this book actually had a lot of somber and emotional issues and both Tiffy and Leon have their own problems, outside of the roommate situation, to work through. I wasn’t expecting the sadness from Leon’s job as a palliative care nurse. Additionally, his brother is wrongly imprisoned so one of Leon’s plotlines involves trying to help him in his appeal and just dealing with all of that. I definitely wasn’t expecting a plotline about Tiffy’s controlling ex-boyfriend who spends much of the novel gaslighting her.
There are some great supporting characters in this book. I loved Tiffy’s friends Rachel, Gerty, and Mo – I liked that they were always on Tiffy’s side, even though sometimes they had to tell her some hard truths. Leon’s brother Richie, although he is in jail, provides some good comic relief.
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