Publication Date: December 3, 2019
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Rating: ★★
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:
Thank you to NetGalley, Rachel Winters & G.P. Putnam’s Sons for a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
When I read the synopsis of Would Like to Meet, I was super interested right away. It sounded like something I’ve never read before and I am an absolute sucker for contemporary romance stories. When I started, I thought it was pretty good. I kept reading and reading and at this point, I was just begging for something to happen. Ultimately, there were good parts of this story, but I feel like most of it fell flat for me.
I will say that Rachel Winters had a particular style of writing. I don’t think it was bad necessarily, but I could absolutely see this being more of a play/screenplay type of story instead of a book. The characters, the premise, everything had so much promise, but as a book, I’m not sure that was the right path.
I am someone who is painfully particular about the characters in a book. I really tried, but I had a really hard time with the main characters, Evie and Ezra. I feel as though Ezra was so unlikable after 60% or so, but I will give props that Rachel Winters was able to make me feel those feelings for him. Evie was kind of self-centered and as I was reading, I kept thinking, “she does not deserve her friends…like at all”. Anette and Ben were the only reasons why I got through. There were some moments that I laughed-out-loud, because of Anette specifically.
Would Like to Meet had a ton of potential, but I feel as though the story was just cliche for me. The characters were unlikable and just not able to be related to. I really liked the idea and I think that if there were more likable moments in this novel that it would easily be a good book.
Lacey's Library 