Review: Ten Rules for Faking It by Sophie Sullivan

ARC provided through NetGalley by the publisher.

This book was not really my thing. This does not mean it will not be yours, but I am certainly not into the book overall. It isn't bad, but I also cannot say that I enjoyed it. Throughout most of the beginning of the book, I thought it was fine, not good or bad, just fine. But as the novel progressed, I became less interested in the story and the characters and less satisfied with the resolution to plot conflict, hence the 2-star rating as opposed to three.

I will start with what I did like about the book! I do think the premise is very cute. A woman, Everly, finds out her boyfriend is cheating on her 30th birthday. When she goes into her radio producing job, her best friend accidentally broadcasts her relationship drama to the listeners, a series of events happens, and the radio station ends us doing a contest sort of like the Bachelorette with Everly at the center. I thought that seemed cute. Also, I liked the portrayal of Everly's anxiety, I really related to a bit where Everly is ranting about people to tell her to relax where she says "When someone tells me to do that, I just want to say, 'Oh, thanks, why didn't I think of that? All better now.'" I thought that bit was highly relatable, being told to relax is the worst. Aside from this, I was pretty meh about a lot of the book.

I found a lot of the plot resolutions unsatisfying. The ex who was cheating on Everly does not have much page-time either as a character on the page or in the thoughts of the main character, all I knew about him was that he banged his assistant. That is shitty, but it also didn't feel like he was actually a character and more that he was just the device to start the plot. Which he was, but I would have cared more if he had maybe had like two personality traits. Or if he and Everly had some sort of conversation about the incident, I found his character arc supremely uninteresting.

The love interest is Chris, Everly's boss, and the dude who pitches the contest, and I just kind of didn't care about his problems either. He has major Daddy issues, he and his brothers are star children who do everything right, and his sister is an idiot. I was particularly annoyed by the sister stuff. But that Dad issues drive most of his plot and I just kind of couldn't be worried about it much. I won't keep going through the plot resolutions I was not interested in, because you can just kind of assume I found them all uninteresting. In fairness, I did skim some bits of the novel, but I already firmly did not care by the time I began to skim. I don't know where I started skimming because it just naturally happen as I became less interested.

Maybe this book will be your thing; it was clearly not mine.

I gave this book two stars on Goodreads. It comes out on January 5th, 2021.