Format: ebook
Published: June 4th, 2024
Age: Adult
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Rating: 2/5 Stars
I really wanted to like this so much more than I did! My frustrations with the book stem from issues that, in my very humble opinion, seem to be industry-wide in certain genres, and could have been resolved with tighter editing. It’s a shame, because the spark of the idea here is really fun.
The book is loosely based off Emma – Jia’s day job is writing listicles for a women’s magazine, but her passion is in matchmaking, and alongside the job she runs a romance blog, doling out advice and opinions, despite never having been involved with anyone in her life. Her best friend is Jaiman, who runs a struggling pub. Made even worse when his culinary school rival moves in next door. Jia is tasked with setting up a coworker to prove she can run her own matchmaking column, but things don’t go according to plan, and she starts to rethink her ideas about love.
One of the most important things for me in Romance is character – I want to really like the characters, I want to be cheering the couple on, I want to feel like their HEA is earned. This book didn’t quite get there. Jia thinks she’d make a great matchmaker, based off two incidences prior to the start of the book, where she orchestrated a couple of meet cutes. When she’s tasked with setting up a new colleague, she runs through her own ideas about ‘love’ and what makes a couple compatible, and based off this, tries to set up a young, shy woman with the office creep.
It often feels really hard to root for Jia. She puts her colleagues in awkward situations, never listens to anyone else, manipulates people around her, and not to say single people can’t ever have advice about relationships, but she has no experience in the area at all, yet judges everyone else and positions herself as an authority on dating. Meanwhile, her best friend Jaiman runs a struggling pub, and is constantly bemoaning his lack of customers, while doing…absolutely nothing to try and attract new customers.
This was a recurring problem with the characters – they weren’t very proactive, doing things only when they absolutely had to or were almost forced into it, and both often came across as fairly self-centred. It made it harder to connect with them and want to see them together. Overall, I think I was largely left feeling disappointed with this one, which was a shame as it was one I was very much looking forward to!
Reading Challenge
Romance Readers Diversity Challenge 2025 ❤️
Prompt: A romance set on a different continent to you (extra points if it’s not Europe or North America)
Progress: 8/12 + 1 Bonus
Unwrapping Words 