Oh, well, from the lofty heights of Obama’s presidential memoirswhich I enjoyed, I went on to read this. I needed a short moment of pure escapism and easy-going reading: “Please excuse me for a moment while I disengage my brain!”
For that purpose, this novel worked well enough – albeit not perfectly but we’ll come to that.
Anyway, this is the third instalment of a loosely connected series about the romantic endeavours of a group of twenty-somethings (I guess). It started out well with Everly’s romance with her boss (Calloway) and now we’re reading about Sophie, Everly’s successor as Calloway’s personal assistant, who meets Camden Cox, a notorious womanizer.
Sophie and Cox end up in Vegas where they “accidentally” marry each other in a drunken stupor. The remainder of the book is – expectedly – about how they find out they don’t want a divorce.
The ensuing chaos is amusing enough; ok, everything is clichéd and rather simplistic but that was to be expected. Worse, though: Every single character feels like an exaggerated parody of themselves and whereas Sophie is fairly likeable, Cox is – for the most part – annoying.
This kind of machismo…
»Ever so gently, I backed us out of the parking spot. A man did not simply drive a supercar. A man had to coax it. Caress it. Make love to it from the driver’s seat and be respectful of its power.«
… and what it says about Cox’ ideas about women made me cringe. He constantly and unchangingly calls Sophie “sugar”. Uh… And she’s pretty much fluttering her eyelids at him, enjoying his manly attention…
So, while this book was still a funny romance, it was just a little too sappy, too simplistic and too clichéd for me to completely enjoy it and, thus, it only garners three out of five stars from me.
