Savannah Cade works as an editor at a boutique publishing house, but her dream is to be an author and to publish the romance novel she’s been writing for the past few years. After she leaves her unfinished manuscript in the hidden room she discovered in the office, she returns to find out that not only has someone else discovered her secret hideaway but this mystery person has also inserted notes in the margin of her manuscript. When the editor that Savannah has pitched her story to has the same concerns as her mystery editor, Savannah decides to work with her unknown critic to get her book up to publishing standards.
I thought this was a super cute premise. I love books that take place in publishing houses and books about books, or where characters are writers, so I thought this book would be spot on. Unfortunately, I didn’t love this book.
I think the first indication that I wasn’t going to love this book was when, in the first chapter, Savannah tripped over her feet and fell in the middle of a meeting, causing her skirt to flip up and show her underwear to everyone. I felt like this was a really tired scenario. I’ve read so many books where the heroine falls over or where the heroine’s skirt flies up and she flashes everyone and I’m kind of over it.
Savannah’s family was horrible. She lives with her sister and her sister’s fiancé, who happens to be the guy that Savannah dated on and off for 8 years until he met and fell in love with her sister. She was living with her friend but the owners of the apartment they were living in decided to sell the apartment so they had to move. Savannah couldn’t find anywhere else to move to that was acceptable so she ended up moving in with her sister. Honestly, I don’t know how much money Savannah earns but if I had the choice between living with my sister and her fiancé who used to be my boyfriend, and living in a horrible apartment, I would choose the horrible apartment. I really had to wonder what Savannah was thinking here. Additionally, Savannah’s family just seemed to think that she should get over her boyfriend dumping her to get engaged to her sister and that they should all be one big happy family.
And let’s get into what was supposed to be the main plot of the book – Savannah and her mystery editor working together and falling in love. I actually really liked the parts where they were editing the manuscript. My issue is that I thought there would be more. I thought there would be so many pages filled with one or both of them reading the comments and thinking about one another but there weren’t. There’s just not a lot of them working together. Savannah keeps telling us that she’s falling for her mystery editor because of all these funny conversations they’re having in the margins of the manuscript but we hardly see these conversations. I think the book would have been much better if there were one or two chapters that were just conversations going back and forth between Savannah and her editor. We see a couple but not enough for me to get why the mystery editor is so great.
I know I keep calling him a mystery editor, but I don’t think it’s a shock to anyone when we find out the mystery editor is Will Pennington, the son of the publishing house’s CEO and newest employee. I really wanted more of Will in the book. I think the romance would have been much stronger if we knew more about Will or had some of his point of view.
Also for a book that is set at a workplace, I thought there would be more scenes of Savannah and all her co-workers actually working. We rarely see them doing their job and I’m not even sure what Savannah does at her job or if she is even good at it. There seem to be lots of meetings but I couldn’t even tell you what they do at these meetings. I guess I just feel that if you are going to bother to set a book at a workplace, then we should see the characters actually work.
This book was fine but I don’t know if I could recommend it to anyone. Maybe if this author had her own mystery editor I would have liked it more.
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