Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, by Christina Lauren
Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating by Christina Lauren
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Phew… Once more, I was looking for a fun romance and despite recent disappointment, I chose to go with Christina Lauren’s “Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating”.
This first sentence of the blurb accurately sums up the essence of this entire novel:
“Just friends. Just friends. JUST FRIENDS. If they repeat it enough, maybe it’ll be true…”
“Hazel”, the same blurb goes on to tell us, “knows she’s a lot to take”. Absolutely, and Hazel does it so well, it leads to a string of boring, horrible, humiliating, and/or confusing double dates on which Josh and Hazel set each other up.
Through these ordeals, which they go through about nine times, they and the reader suffer, but Josh and Hazel realise only very late they were actually going out with each other. This reader, on the other hand, would have had the chance to learn through pain and DNF this… novel. (He didn’t.)
Josh — well, guess what: Josh was so memorable, I’ve already forgotten everything about him. I’ve made no annotations about him, I have no highlights that would showcase his character. Just nothing. I think that either speaks volumes about my memory, or about the blandness of the character. You get to be the judge of that.
There’s not much more to be said about this one: It was clichéd, adequately written, sometimes a bit slow, and at no point did it exceed mediocrity.
Compared to the fresh, sensitive, and much more enjoyable “The Paradise Problem”, or the “raw, awesome honesty” reflected hilariously in “The Unhoneymooners”, “Josh and Hazel” feels simplistic, old-fashioned, and more shallow and bland.
The novel is still good enough for three stars out of five.
