Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Love By the Book

Love By the Book
By Melissa Pimentel
Penguin Books, 2015. 336 pages. Fiction

Lauren Cunningham has moved from America to London in search of a fabulous single life with many a romantic dalliance and no relationship commitments.  Feeling that she's a bit unlucky in love, she decides to start an experiment in which she will follow a different dating guide each month, until she finds the perfect fit for her.  What follows is a drastically different Lauren from month to month, and some interesting observations about the dating world around her.

I adore audiobook narrator Jayne Entwhistle, and so I did a search on Overdrive (our resource for downloadable ebooks and audiobooks) for any audiobooks read by her and found this book.  True to form, Entwhistle did a delightful performance.  The story, however was a bit unexpected in both that it was a little more raunchy than I thought it would be, and then was more meaningful than I expected.  The first "dating experiment" Lauren goes on was so cringe-inducingly awful that I worried the book would be "here's how to screw up every relationship with different dating guides."  But Lauren does find some success with different methods, and in turn the guides give her some insights into herself and the guys she dates.  But I sure did feel bad for that first guy!

BHG

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