After catching her ex cheating, radio producer Everly Dean blurts out everything to her friend/colleague Stacey. But when her angry rant about her ex’s betrayal is accidentally heard on-air, Everly’s misfortune leads to a Bachelorette-style series of dates that will hopefully help her get out of her comfort zone.
There were things about this book I liked and things I didn’t like. I generally liked the book. I thought the plot was entertaining, I loved the friendship between the women, and I appreciated the inclusion of Everly’s social anxiety. I also enjoyed the way Everly finally stood up for herself with her parents at the end of the novel.
However, there were some things that kind of annoyed me that I kept coming back to while reading:
The constant harping of Everly turning 30. She has a lot of inner monologue about how now that she’s 30, she should go out on these dates, or she should be brave, or she should tell her parents what she thinks. As someone who is definitely over 30, it drives me crazy when people think turning 30 (or even turning 40) is the end of the world or that somehow magically, they should be a different person as soon as the clock hits midnight on their birthday. It’s just a plot device that I don’t appreciate.
I also could not see the chemistry between Chris (Everly’s boss at the radio station) and Everly. Chris is infatuated with Everly before the book starts and I don’t even know why he likes her. When we get his point of view, all he can say is that he hardly ever talks to her and can’t be in a room with her because she walks into the room and he loses his breath because she’s so beautiful. Or she smiles and he thinks she has the most beautiful smile or she laughs and it’s just the best thing he’s ever heard. But he can’t talk to her because he doesn’t know what to say. And I just kept thinking, does he know anything about her other than what she looks like and what she sounds like when she laughs? According to Everly’s point of view, they hardly ever talk because both of them are just so nervous around one another and can’t think of anything to say. But Chris is practically in love with her? I mean, I got to page 200 and Chris says something like he didn’t realize Everly was so funny and I’m sitting here yelling, I’m two/thirds into this book and you’re just now finding out she’s funny? How can you like her when you seem to have no clue as to her personality?
Then, I’m not going to tell you what happens, but near the end of the book, Everly has a completely (in my opinion) unwarranted reaction about something in Chris’s past that turned me off her. I thought her reaction was out of line and it made me dislike her.
This book had a lot of interesting ideas but did nothing with them. The Bachelorette competition had no real bearing on the plot. In fact, we only actually see Everly go out on two of the dates and the other dates are just mentioned in passing. I guess I thought that something specifically called out in the synopsis would have actually been in the book.
This book wasn’t a great fit for me.
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