What’s better than a socially-awkward but very smart heroine hitting rock bottom before meeting the guy who’ll change everything? If you’re me, that’s a recipe for a highly entertaining romance.
This was the first Reid book I read and it made me an instant fan. I just reread it so I could write this review, and enjoyed it just as much the second time.
Janie is awesome. Not in the she’s-a-martial-arts-master way. She’s a dork, but a very lovable dork. As I mentioned, she’s socially awkward, which manifests in an especially amusing way: verbal diarrhea of random facts. These aren’t run-of-the-mill facts, either—Janie knows a ton about a lot of things. She’s not just socially inept, but kind of awkward in general. This can sometimes bug me (the whole Silly Woman thing), but in this case it worked because she wasn’t really that blundering and when she did encounter these moments, she was hilarious in reporting them. Case in point (after she’s just been laid off and is surprised to be getting sent home in a car):
The car was a limo.
I’d never been in a limo before, so of course I spent the first several minutes in shock, the next several minutes playing with the buttons, then the subsequent several minutes after that trying to clean up the mess made by an exploding water bottle.
We learn pretty early that Janie doesn’t have a lot of body confidence because she’s tall and curvy. But she’s not a withering flower. When someone comments, “You’re very big,” she quips, “Yes, I ate all my vegetables as a child.”
Before the book starts, Janie regularly admired a security guard at her building. And he’s the one who escorts her out and arranges the limo when she’s laid off. Then suddenly he—Quinn—is in her life all the time and she doesn’t know what to think because he’s the most attractive man she’s ever known. After his intentions become clearer, she and her friend decide he’s a “Wendell”—a hot player you’d never actually date, but can have loads of fun with anyway. We also get another useful term: “slamp,” the kind of girl who is willing to partake of a Wendell’s services.
Watching everything unfold is a lot of fun. The book’s told entirely from Janie’s perspective. I usually like the guy’s perspective too, but in this case, the single viewpoint works really well because Quinn is meant to be very enigmatic.
As I’ve implied before, the book’s also very funny. Dialogue is clever and fresh and Janie’s obscure-fact monologues really are hilarious if you appreciate nerds at all. Reid bills all her books as romantic comedies but to me they’re just contemporaries that happen to be funny. But that’s just splitting hairs.
The book’s also sexy, even though the love scenes aren’t as detailed as in some of Reid’s later books. Also, these scenes are full of over-analyzing gems like this: “My reactions were entirely medulla oblongata-based.” A sentence later she clarifies what she means—that her brain is malfunctioning because of what’s currently happening. It’s funny and doesn’t dissipate the heat like you might think.
I think any romance reader who’s got a bit of the nerd in them would love this book, but that’s not a requirement. It’s just a funny novel with a likable heroine and a sexy and appealing hero. Who doesn’t enjoy that?