Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsMadcap, rom com fun.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 10, 2015
All right. Where to begin. What a sweet, funny book. No sex at all. So don't be reading this for the hot and sweaty. But my goodness, what a good group of characters, so to speak.
First, I am okay with hot and sweaty. Ain't got no problems with the door-wide-open, hot-and-sweaty, down-and-dirty scenes. But I am also fine without them.
This book is funny. Nobody gets drunk and throws up (okay, a bit tipsy, no vomit), not bodily function "humor," no sexual innuendo humor. Just humorous situation comedy, humorous stream-of-consciousness meanderings, and some sweet and funny repartee.
I even love the cover.
Kasey is our heroine. She finds herself in predicaments. The first predicament we find her in is in the opening of the book where she is, well, being shown the figurative door by her live-in boyfriend. Well, almost live-in boyfriend. She has given up her apartment, moved the majority of her stuff into his apartment, but she loses her job and with her job she loses the live-in boyfriend who is concerned an unemployed Kasey won't pull her financial weight.
I don't want to ruin the fun and frivolity that follows, so I will just say it does, indeed, follow. Kasey happens to meet a wondrous group of people and she is blessed with a home, new friends, and a new place to hang out.
Anyway, loved the book. But I do have a few issues. Okay, Kasey doesn't want to be dependent on anybody ever again. Understandable. And the breakup is new and ever present on her mind. I get that. But she carries it to the exxxxxxxtreme and it gets a bit annoying. There is even a moment where she has a serious and relatively long stream of consciousness mental ramble where she nails it, how she is hypersensitive, there is a difference between being polite and being manipulative. But she keeps on with the prickly "you can't take care of ME!" 'tude that really needs to go away.
The second issue: proofing. There is a self-described unproofed excerpt that follows the completed book. I can only assume since the author put "unproofed" she knows proofing is an issue. And I will tell you if it weren't for the fact I was caught up in the book fairly early on, I would have figuratively thrown my Kindle across the room. Since I am too cheap to do that, I just delete books that are poorly proofed/edited from my account. I couldn't bring myself to do it in this case. She consistently and maddeningly puts the comma after conjunctions. "Where" and "were" are wrong more than once. People are walking through a "crowed." Compound adjectives are not hyphenated and in some places it makes for painting a very confusing mental picture of what is going on. And yes, before those of you who don't care about punctuation and such say it doesn't matter, it really does. Seeing a comma after a conjuction causes the reader to pause (at least the readers who know such things), and that is not what you want. And yes, misspelled words do matter. The author saying someone had a "schmear" campaign instead of a "smear" campaign literally brought a picture of someone spreading cream cheese over someone else to my mind. Again, not everybody cares, but if you do, you really do. A "palette" instead of a "palate" also can be jarring.
So I will stop dwelling on the technical part. Yes, the editing/proofing issues bothered me. But I still adored the book. Short, quick read. Fun and funny without being disgusting. A "clean" romance with no inspie undertones. A HFN, not an HEA. But still a good little story.
