"if fucking old men is wrong i don't want to be right!

(i've never fucked an old man, but i'm sure ready to read about it)"

"Are you kidding me?

What is happening right now?
I don't think my mental stability can handle the ending of this book. First you make me feel in love with Kate and then we begin to like the witch boys and then in this book we're all in love and taking family and the future and romance and making plans and eating meals together and isn't her grandmother's cookware. But that ending... Literally severed something vital.
I love that Kate has embraced her new life.
I love the coven of sisterhood.
I love the budding tentative friendship building at least between Lo and Tanner.
I love lazy breakfasts and Saturday girls only coffee dates.
Book 3 was amazing. I loved every word.
"

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� This book started out SO WELL, and then tragically deteriorated, but think of it as like half a four-star read and half a two-star one. So: three stars.

I've seen Kasie West quite a lot on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, but never read one of her books*, and when I came across the ARC of this one I downloaded it on a random impulse even though contemporary rom-coms aren't really my favourite genre. Sadly, this book won't be the one to change that, but it gave it a good go for the first 50% or so.

*Okay, Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ tells me I apparently read one of her books like five years ago, but I have no memory of it and I never reviewed it either, so let's discount that one.

The story opens with 24-year-old Margot Hart snogging 27-year-old Oliver Gray like her life depends on it. She's just met him on 'the apps' (possibly to avoid inadvertent publicity, the apps that form the foundation of this book are never actually named, but we presume it's Tinder because there are references to swiping left, which I gather is a Tinder concept) and they had an absolutely horrible date, complete with stilted small talk and unintentional rudeness. But now they're in his car, and the chemistry is off the charts - until Oliver suggests conversation, Margot backs off, and they go their separate ways. For the next three years.

But they don't really forget about each other, because every so often Margot will re-download the apps in a fit of loneliness, where she's confronted with Oliver once again. And now, she pulls the trigger on messaging him again, resulting in a snowball that ultimately culminates in something she didn't think she wanted: a relationship that didn't start as a meet-cute.

I think my biggest issue with the book, all told, is that its ENTIRE PREMISE is 'the meet-cute': Margot is meant to be obsessed with them, and meant to believe that she and Oliver aren't really fated because unlike all the couples around her, including her perfect influencer older sister, they don't have a meet-cute but met on the apps. No fun, no excitement, no cool story to tell their grandchildren.

Yet this dissipates as a concern remarkably quickly for something that's meant to be her raison d'etre. She gets a meet-cute later on with someone else, and doesn’t even suffer a qualm of regret about saying no. It feels like entire premise of the book gets brushed away as soon as Oliver and Margot are actually together, and is never really revisited. Margot's burning desire for a meet-cute felt so insanely relatable in our algorithm-based world, so much so that I actually highlighted her waxing lyrical about it.

So yeah, I'm disappointed at how this element didn't really deliver at all, considering it's like the entire foundation for the first half of the book.

Secondly, the 'big conflict' is� actually quite bad. Is there anything worse than a superficially progressive, modern hero who calls himself a feminist, but ends up actually doing something that strips the heroine of full consent? I've talked about this more deeply in my review for Sam Mariano's The Boy on the Bridge but basically, in dark romances the entire moral framework of the in-book universe is warped, so it's quite clear the author is not intending to present the hero as an actual paragon of manhood. In books like West's, however, the hero is presented to the reader as someone with real-life romantic credentials (hence Oliver professing himself a feminist) so the fact he did THIS required far more grovelling and should have been treated with far more gravity than it was. Here's the spoiler for what he actually did:

(view spoiler)[Oliver is the ex-boyfriend of Margot's older sister, he knew this when he slept with her, but she didn't. She didn't have all the facts she needed to consent, because she says herself she probably wouldn't have slept with him in the first place if she knew - though she then gets over this offputtingly quickly and displaces her anger from Oliver, her rightful target, to her sister. The fact that her BOYFRIEND was hung up on and has also slept with her SISTER, when Margot already suffers from a massive insecurity complex around her sister's perfection, is not really addressed at all, just glossed over as 'jealousy issues' in the epilogue. (hide spoiler)]This manufactured drama is just handled badly all around and ruined my positive feelings about the entire book.

There are smaller issues around Margot's character - she's a huge hot mess of bad decisions, but I don't require perfect heroines so I'm trying to get over that - plus the believability of her setting up her own literary agency in a saturated market and getting multiple queries and a star client almost straightaway, and lastly the fact that the 'love' between the characters feels very superficial. But those are my biggies.

On the bright side, the prose is very readable - flows smoothly, very to-the-point, draws you in. I also liked that the book felt modern without doing that thing authors do when they try to make the book TOO modern, by stuffing their writing with references to Taylor Swift and TikTok and US presidential elections, which always ends up dating the book instead. This book kept it quite low-key with just TikTok and discussions of remote working, which made it feel very 2020s in a good way.



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