Romance
Cheerfully irreverent, bitingly funny, and filled with romantic charm, Cara Tanamachi's The Second You're Single is all about navigating the most romantic month of the year, and how love always seems to arrive when you least expect it.
Freelance
writer Sora Reid believes in inertia. She’s the odd one out in a
close-knit family of go-getters, including her Japanese-American mom,
who hints about her need to lose weight, and her soon-to-be married,
overachieving younger sister, who needs her to have a date for the
wedding, since a wedding party couples' dance with their Scottish great
uncle Bob simply won't do. For Sora, minimal input, minimal expectations
is the way to go. She’d rather stay at home with her insufferable
neighbor and her adorable pitbull.
The one thing that disrupts
her inertia: an intense dislike for Valentine’s Day. What is it with the
commercial love machine? Why do we pin our hopes on one romantic day,
when staying home with a package of bacon and a bottle of tequila would
be way better? Sora’s been betrayed and disappointed more than once and
her heart is starting to feel like her Grandma Mitsuye’s antique
Japanese ceramic bowl, with its many gold-filled cracks.
When her
pledge to stay single in February inspires readers to #gosolo, Sora has
a responsibility to empower her readers. But relationships aren’t built
to last, so it shouldn’t be that hard. Right?
Enter Jack Mann. A muscle-bound baker who looks like he lifts logs on the weekends, Sora hasn’t thought of Jack since they were in elementary school together. When they see each other at the local grocery store and the attraction hits hard, Sora knows she has to shut it down, quick. She can’t #gosolo AND get the guy. She can’t let down her readers. And relationships always end, so why should Jack be any different–even though he’s confounding all her long-held expectations of love?
3.5 STARS
I have to admit that I had mixed feelings on this one. Which always makes it hard for me to rate.
I did like that it had both Sora and Jack's individual P.O.V.'s. Turns out sassy Sora was a problem with confrontation avoidance and to tell a few people to buzz off. It becomes clear how much of that comes from her childhood. She also needed to ask for what she wanted too. She just needed to figure out what that was. I did like her anyway.
Jack was such a lumberjack sized sweetie. It was easy to feel what he was feeling about his past and his feelings for Sora both past and current. I didn't realize until almost towards the end of the book that Jack had a problem when it came to something HE needed to confront. I still liked him anyway.
With all of that said, even with an unusual story idea, it just didn't grab me as much as I would have liked. There I said it.
Would I ever try this author again? Yes, because of some of the humor and fun conversations between the main characters.
“I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.”
(Netgalley)
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