Love Like This Book Review
2.5/5 stars
This is the first book in The Romance Chronicles.
Love Like This, by Sophie Love, is centred around a travel writer who, in the midst of problems with her boyfriend, has a fading belief in love. By chance, she is given an assignment in which she has to report on a festival of love in Ireland. During her time there, she begins to develop feelings for her tour guide. This is far from a spoiler. In fact, I don't think any plot points in the book can be construed as a spoiler. From the moment I started this book, I had basically the entire plot worked out in my head. I know that this is a contemporary romance novel, a genre which doesn't seem to leave much wiggle room for individuality, but there should still be some! I find that the plot of Love Like This to be far too predictable and rather cliche. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good cliche. I'm a sucker for cutesy romance books and romcoms. I loved To All the Boys I've Loved Before (the book and the movie) as well as The Kissing Booth. They both took their respective ideas — the fake dating trope and the loving your best friend's brother trope — and spun it so it could stand uniquely in mounds of similar stories. With Love Like This, however, I feel a lack of this sense of individuality. Being able to predict everything before it happened is, honestly, frustrating. Even scenes that are written as if they're a big reveal aren't remotely hard to guess ahead of time.
The plot, along with being predictable, is very fast-paced. At some points in the book, I really appreciated this. There's nothing worse when reading than waiting until you're halfway through the book for the plot to start. This book, thankfully, doesn't spend too long on feeding the reader context and descriptions. However, this also left me with the impression that some crucial moments —moments that drastically alter a character or relationship — are skimmed over and therefore feel underwhelming. Although the whole point of the book is to instill faith in love at first sight and true love, this didn't come through in the writing. This may be my own lack of faith in these things, but I feel that it seems unrealistic for the two main characters to fall in love so deeply in such a short amount of time. After all, the main character Keira is only in Ireland a month, and she spends about half of her trip trying to figure out if she even likes her love interest, Shane, as a person. This is a point that is constantly contradicted in the book. There are times in the book where Keira hates Shane for his lighthearted teasing, and this paints her as an uptight workaholic, which would have been fine if that characteristic had been consistent. At times that are tenser, Keira claims to miss the way that Shane fools around with her. If I didn't already know exactly how things were going to unfold, I would have been very confused. Even the description of the character herself, portrayed as someone who puts her work above everything, doesn't seem to be doing an awful lot of work in the book.
This is another thing that bothered me a lot; the way the characters are described and the way the characters act vastly differs. I think that this happens because the reader is often being told how the characters are evolving rather than being shown it. The main journey for the character, I believe, is learning to trust people and develop faith in love. By the end of the book, Keira is constantly talking about how much she's changed, but still says things or reacts in ways that suggest that she hasn't learned to trust people and doesn't really believe her love story will work out. The only moment I think that we're really shown how much the character has changed is at the very end of the book, and even then, it's constantly interrupted by the reader being told that Keira has changed.
The writing, overall, doesn't mesh well with me I think. I listened to this book as an audiobook rather than reading it, and that may be the reason I found the writing to be repetitive and overdramatic. It is entirely possible that, had I read the book myself, some of the events may have come across differently and more realistically, but as an audiobook, it felt like Keira was making a really big deal out of things that were of little significance.
Despite having heavily mixed feelings throughout the book, I found the conclusion satisfying. I feel that Love did a good job of portraying a balance of love and career, where Keira isn't forced to choose one over the other, and I think that this overall takeaway of the book is beneficial for people who are beginning a new stage of their life and are learning to balance their personal lives with their professional lives.
This is another thing that bothered me a lot; the way the characters are described and the way the characters act vastly differs. I think that this happens because the reader is often being told how the characters are evolving rather than being shown it. The main journey for the character, I believe, is learning to trust people and develop faith in love. By the end of the book, Keira is constantly talking about how much she's changed, but still says things or reacts in ways that suggest that she hasn't learned to trust people and doesn't really believe her love story will work out. The only moment I think that we're really shown how much the character has changed is at the very end of the book, and even then, it's constantly interrupted by the reader being told that Keira has changed.
The writing, overall, doesn't mesh well with me I think. I listened to this book as an audiobook rather than reading it, and that may be the reason I found the writing to be repetitive and overdramatic. It is entirely possible that, had I read the book myself, some of the events may have come across differently and more realistically, but as an audiobook, it felt like Keira was making a really big deal out of things that were of little significance.
Despite having heavily mixed feelings throughout the book, I found the conclusion satisfying. I feel that Love did a good job of portraying a balance of love and career, where Keira isn't forced to choose one over the other, and I think that this overall takeaway of the book is beneficial for people who are beginning a new stage of their life and are learning to balance their personal lives with their professional lives.
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