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A review by luluwoohoo
A Merry Little Meet Cute by Sierra Simone, Julie Murphy
hopeful
lighthearted
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
A Merry Little Meet Cute by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone
☀️☀️🌤️
An equally sweet and sexy concept that got too weighed down in a hefty page count to stick the desired landing.
The setup of this story was fabulous - strong, succinct, well developed. But as soon as the second act started it steadily went downhill. The story lost all momentum and felt like it was hitting obligatory story beats rather than having a natural progression of things. The unnecessary double reveal made everything take too long, especially considering the romantic relationship was fast tracked due to their previous crushes on each other. Without that tension to guide us along the whole thing just felt blah.
The chemistry between the MCs was decent, but the aforementioned mutual crushes weakened their developing relationship for me. Individually Bee was the more interesting, stronger character, so I preferred her POV in general. When it came to their backstories, Bee's secret at least made sense to keep hidden, but Nolan's was strange and quite frankly a bad portrayal of bipolar.
For a book of 400+ pages I would expect better depth of character and more interesting sub plots than we got. If this was ~250 pages of simpler Christmassy goodness I think it would have been far improved, but in its current state I was skimming through and left wanting more out of the inflated page count.
☀️☀️🌤️
An equally sweet and sexy concept that got too weighed down in a hefty page count to stick the desired landing.
The setup of this story was fabulous - strong, succinct, well developed. But as soon as the second act started it steadily went downhill. The story lost all momentum and felt like it was hitting obligatory story beats rather than having a natural progression of things. The unnecessary double reveal made everything take too long, especially considering the romantic relationship was fast tracked due to their previous crushes on each other. Without that tension to guide us along the whole thing just felt blah.
The chemistry between the MCs was decent, but the aforementioned mutual crushes weakened their developing relationship for me. Individually Bee was the more interesting, stronger character, so I preferred her POV in general. When it came to their backstories, Bee's secret at least made sense to keep hidden, but Nolan's was strange and quite frankly a bad portrayal of bipolar.
For a book of 400+ pages I would expect better depth of character and more interesting sub plots than we got. If this was ~250 pages of simpler Christmassy goodness I think it would have been far improved, but in its current state I was skimming through and left wanting more out of the inflated page count.
"Christmas movies couldn’t be that hard to make, right? They were almost like porn. The scripts were on the flimsy side and the production times were shorter than a community college wintermester."