Synopsis:
Cute bikini: tick Icy cocktails: tick Glossy magazines: tick Person on the next sun lounger: *worst nightmare*
Chronically single Kate is winning at life. She’s finally saved enough to live alone in her dream home, she has a great group of friends, and she has – at last – perfected the ultimate chocolate cake. So what if her love life is dead on arrival? Forget sex, she can make a sponge that would blow your socks off.
Aside from her romantic dry spell (is it still a ‘spell’ if it’s been years…?!), everything is going according to plan. But when she finds out one of her oldest friends Andy is travelling abroad and needs her help, she knows she’ll have to drop everything and fly out to him.
Only problem is, Daniel, the mutual friend she blames for Andy’s wild lifestyle, is coming with her. It’s the first holiday abroad she’s been able to afford in years, and she has to spend it with him?!
But when Daniel and Kate arrive, they soon find themselves having the unexpected romantic holiday of a lifetime. Swimming in crystal clear waters, sharing delicious meals and exploring beautiful local villages… It would all be perfect, if only they weren’t with each other.
And as the days pass, and more than one waiter mistakes her and Daniel for a honeymooning couple, Kate has to remind herself that there’s a reason she stayed single all these years. But as she sips her dry Martini and watches Daniel’s toned body dive into the pool, she wonders if it’s possible to have the perfect holiday with a man you hate… Or if maybe Daniel isn’t so bad after all?
Review:
Do not believe the part of this book’s marketing and synopsis that says it’s “A totally hilarious and feel-good enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy”. Drug addiction, toxic friendships and relationships are by no means “totally hilarious”. I couldn’t even make it 25% into this book before getting bored and sick of the awful characters.
Firstly, Kate, our main character is horrible. She never has a nice thought about anyone and all of her relationships and friendships are two dimensional. The author has given me reason to believe that these people are actually friends. There’s also way too many side characters to the point where none of them have personalities, including Kate and Daniel. All you learn about Daniel in the first quarter of the book is that Kate hates him for some reason and also he was party animal 15 years ago.
At one point Kate and Daniel play some weird game about the London Tube stations that you can’t understand without knowing them well (which I don’t) nevermind the rules never being explained. So there’s multiple paragraphs of them just throwing what I assume are station names at each other. I skipped over this part and it’s almost what made me stop reading. However, I’ve had so many DNFs this year, I decided to push through and give it a fair chance, but no, this book is awful.
The plot is also all over the place. It claims to be a rom-com but the majority of what I read was just hearing about how Andy is a terrible person who ruins the lives of everyone around him without feeling any remorse. Yet Daniel is the one Kate hates. It really doesn’t make sense and all this talk about drug addiction wasn’t fun to read. Especially as this is clearly marketed as romance and doesn’t include trigger warnings anywhere.
I’d highly recommend you DON’T check out this book. It’s not at all what it claims to be and I’m never reading anything from this author again.
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