Would Like to Meet

Author: Rachel Winters
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (December 3, 2019)
Kindle edition, 336 pages
Romance, Contemporary Romance, Romantic Comedy
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Summary
After seven years as an assistant, 29-year-old Evie Summers is ready to finally get the promotion she deserves. But now the TV and film agency she’s been running behind the scenes is in trouble, and Evie will lose her job unless she can convince the agency’s biggest and most arrogant client, Ezra Chester, to finish writing the script for a Hollywood romantic comedy.

The catch? Ezra is suffering from writer’s block–and he’ll only put pen to paper if singleton Evie can prove to him that you can fall in love like they do in the movies. With the future of the agency in jeopardy, Evie embarks on a mission to meet a man the way Sally met Harry or Hugh Grant met Julia Roberts.

But in the course of testing out the meet-cute scenes from classic romantic comedies IRL, not only will Evie encounter one humiliating situation after another, but she’ll have to confront the romantic past that soured her on love. In a novel as hilarious as it is heartwarming, debut author Rachel Winters proves that sometimes real life is better than the movies–and that the best kind of meet-cutes happen when you least expect them.

Review
I had SUSPICIONS from the get-go, and then I was really hoping that said suspicions would prove out because I began to be VERY conflicted about who I wanted Evie to end up with! This book gave me major second lead syndrome and while I knew who she’d end up with in the end (or thought I did), there were definitely moments where I had hope for the Other Guy. I was even wracking my brain trying to figure out how they could somehow be the same person so she could end up with them both, hahahaha (yes I’m silly).

Ohhhhh Evie. I love how she puts on a brave face and goes through with all these meet-cutes, and how she starts to find herself throughout this book. She’s just… she’s such a terrible friend, like to the point where her character is both likable and pretty unlikable at the same time. My feelings for her confuse me, haha. Also, as someone who is super into rom-coms and romances, Evie sure is dense as to her repeated meet-cutes that fate keeps arranging with Ben…

Evie alternately made me want to hug her and strangle her (a feeling her friends could likely relate to…) and her friends were a little interchangeable and felt sort of extraneous at times. Ben and Anette basically made this book for me, and weirdly Ezra as well. I wish we’d gotten some chapters from the male lead’s POV, because I’d really have liked to see inside his head (and the second lead’s head too, come to think of it…) but I get why the story is told from Evie’s POV.

This was a fun read that somehow stayed really light-hearted and also dealt with some serious issues like self-confidence, standing up for yourself, the terrible and unhealthy work/life situation some people are put in, not letting someone else’s opinion derail your dreams… I’m looking forward to reading more by Rachel Winters, for sure.

An ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley for review. All opinions are unbiased and my own.