Links: Amazon, Goodreads. Price: £8.27
Jen may hate her job marketing sanitary products but it lets her keep control, keep control over her relationship with lawyer Robert, keep an eye on her younger sister Lydia who lost a leg in the accident that killed both her parents, and keep her life in spreadsheet perfect order so that she has time to follow her true passion: craft brewing. An unexpected proposal, followed by an even more unexpected kiss, throws her order into chaos and forces her to ask: how is it that she really wants to live?
I have mixed feelings about this book. To start off with, the author attempts something tremendously challenging. Jen, our protagonist, feels less like a character and more like a list of things she does. The first third of the novel is kind of hard work. The beats happen as and when you’d expect, and because Jen doesn’t seem to have much of a personality to speak of it’s kind of hard to care.
Then, in the second third, you start to see that the emptiness in Jen’s life was kind of the point: Hughes is cleverly mirroring her with her Robert, and burying her passion as a hobby hobbles it as much for the reader as it is, in fact, for Jen. That’s clever. But the book was still having trouble pushing my buttons.
Thankfully things shake up as we reach the third act. Jen’s lack of an inner life is worth it for when she starts to discover one, and even more so when she discovers how she’s been impacting the people around her. This is still romance by the numbers (nothing wrong with that, good by the pool or on the train read), but relationships that initially seem unpromising turn out to be powerful and those you thought were essential are side-lined: exactly the journey Jen takes. I’m glad I took it with her.
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