Rating: 5 stars
StoryGraph Easy Reading Challenge 25: A book with two authors
Felicity "Fizzy" Chen loves her life and career as a romance writer. The problem is that she's suffering from a bad case of writers' block, and when she's asked about her personal life in interviews or author panels, it's not like she can confess to never actually having been in love, right? A romance writer should surely have experienced romantic love at some point? With all of her friends happily coupled up, she's also getting pretty tired of her casual dating lifestyle.
Connor Prince is a divorced documentary film maker whose boss orders him to create a successful reality TV dating show, or he'll get fired. Losing his job would force him to move, and that would mean not seeing his daughter very often, which is an unacceptable option, in his eyes. After a run-in with Fizzy, he's pretty sure he has the perfect pitch - one of the reigning queens of romance finding her own Prince Charming. Fizzy is fairly unimpressed when she first meets him (it's clear that he has very litte understanding or respect for romance novels as a genre, and he clearly hasn't read a single one of her books), and sends him an absolutely ludicrous list of demands. He agrees to pretty much all of them, and suddenly, Fizzy is about to become a reality TV star.
Before the show can start filming, they need to locate a suitable selection of dates for Fizzy, and she has insisted that the various "romance heroes" represent many of the tropes found in the genre. She also discovers that her first impression of Connor, as a money hungry media guy couldn't be further from the truth, and as she spends more time with him during pre-production of the show, it becomes clear that no matter how many charming men the production team manage to scrounge up - her ideal man may in fact be the one whose career depends on her finding happiness with another guy.
Fizzy was an awesome supporting character in The Soulmate Equation and while I liked that book a lot, I absolutely loved this one. Fizzy and Connor are just such great characters, both seperately and apart. We obviously get cameos from Jess, River and Juno (who happens to be good friends with Connor's daughter - he coaches their soccer team) and it's lovely to see their continued HEA as a side story. Since Juno was never an annoying plot moppet, but felt like an actual human girl, I was relieved to see that Christina Lauren continued their streak of believable and likeable tween girls in this book. Connor's ex-wife and her new boyfriend were great additions to the supporting cast, as were several fun members of the reality TV production team.
While this is probably not a perfect romance novel for some, it just worked really well for me, which might be a bit strange, considering I've never watched a single episode of any dating show, ever. That should tell you how great this is. I saw someone on Goodreads saying that Connor is clearly based on Brett Goldstein, and that's certainly not a bad mental image to have of him. If I have to mentally cast Fizzy, it would probably be someone like Sherry Cola from Nobody Wants This, she and Fizzy seem to have the same kind of energy to me.
Judging a book by its cover: This is fine, I guess? I like purple and red, and who doesn't like fireworks? It also doesn't feature cartoon depictions of the main characters, so I guess I'm happy they did something different.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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