This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Kay Brooks
With the purpose of finding freedom and new experiences, Lauren Cunningham moves from America to London, where she hopes she’ll find lots of Englishmen to have fun with. Her search for lots of casual sex without scaring men away is not as successful as she’d hoped. Most of the men she encounters look for an escape route, fearing the dreaded next step of a relationship. Lauren looks to self-help dating guides for advice. She follows the rules of a different book each month and chronicles the results. Is Lauren in for adventure or simply sidestepping heartache?
This is supposed to be a humorous insight into the world of dating for the modern young woman. Lauren is American, beautiful and has a job that would suggest she is intelligent. Unfortunately this was difficult to believe with some of the decisions she made. Some of her escapades and men she comes into contact with are amusing, but some genuinely made my stomach turn. For example, she meets an older man who is happily divorced and living in an attic above his married friends, where he smokes weed and watches box-sets. Despite his many shortcomings, Lauren seems to think she is lucky when he allows her to have sex with him. I spent much of my time wondering where her self-esteem was.
There are parts that are comparable to Bridget Jones’ Diary, in that Lauren is single and looking for dates. The main difference is that where Bridget comes across as being genuine in her desire to love and be loved, Lauren is looking for sex with lots of different men and is not interested in a relationship. I found it very difficult to like her; her character was under-developed and, writing this now, I realise I don’t know much about her apart from the fact that she has a sister who is a lesbian, she works at a science museum and likes to have lots of random sex. We do find out more about her background, involving the rather mysterious but mainly ignored Dylan later, but it came too late for me to feel any empathy or understanding for her character. The men she meets also failed to pique my interest. Most of them are as self-obsessed as Lauren herself is or just plain boring. I feel that Pimentel has done the male population of London a bit of an injustice with this!
The book is basically a series of dating disasters, some of which are more amusing than others. Towards the end of the novel, things seemed to get more surreal. It was really difficult not to give up on the book when Lauren hands out Thanksgiving cards with messages on asking if the recipient knows anyone that might like to have sex with her. She then, rather incredulously as she is supposed to be intelligent, questions why she gets an influx of odd strangers contacting her!A great premise for a novel with a disappointing lead character.
4/10