i hate this book cover. detest it utterly. my first order of business if i were to obtain a physical copy would be to rip it off and give it that “so used the cover fell off” look. i hate the trend of colorful silhouetted romance covers. it tells me approximately 0 about what the book is actually about. 

in all honesty, i loved this book to pieces. i was ready to give up on the romance genre since so many people preached about this one and that and i would consistently pick them up only to put them back down again. i accepted the fact that the contemporary romance genre just wasn’t for me and i could find joy scratching that itch through other genre books and fanfiction—but as is often the case, i just hadn’t found the right book yet. 

Book Lovers opens with a rather tongue-in-cheek, meta, and very-aware-of-it’s-genre passage—owed to our main protagonist, Nora, who is working as a literary agent in the publishing industry. it’s a gimmick you’d think would get tired quickly, but it works like boiling a frog slowly since at first you are with Nora eye-to-eye and sure-footed, and in the next moment the fourth wall gets rebuilt and you’re nothing but a powerless observer on the other side. it, like many other books of its genre, falls into many traps of cheesiness and clichés, but it remains just charming enough throughout that you forgive it. It's laugh-out-loud and funny, the tension is immaculate and despite the gripes of genre expectation, it’s HONEST. 

moral of the story. truly. for the love of god and i mean this you have never heard this before in your life: NEVER judge a book by its cover.