I received this e-ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

So, a few disclaimers. I'd never read anything by this author prior to picking up this e-ARC. I had no idea who she was. I just saw a super cute rom-com cover with a title that suggested that the book would take inspiration from one of my favorite books of all time.

I am a multi-faceted nerd. I enjoy many hobbies including reading, television, movies, music, crochet, and sports. Mostly football and baseball, but I also have a passing knowledge of other popular sports and athletes. As I was reading this book, which is about a sportswriter trying to catch her big break by interviewing a hot-shot basketball star, I just kept thinking to myself, "This feels like it was written by someone who has never actually been to a sporting event and uses the phrase 'sportsball' to demonstrate some sort of perceived superiority over people who enjoy competitive sport."
So you can imagine my surprise to learn that this woman has been romantically connected to multiple professional athletes, and was a member of the cast of the 'reality' show Basketball Wives for several seasons. She's also a model and spokesperson, shilling countless products on her instagram, including harmful diuretics masquerading as diet drinks. I'm not sure if she was counting on her previous platform as an influencer to help her sell books, but I can't imagine they actually sold on merit, so it must have worked.

I know that I'm being harsh and judgmental, but when I read a book as poorly-written as this pile of nonsense get published while other, more talented writers get overlooked after years and years of working on their craft, I get a little salty. Okay, I get a lot salty. I'm not a writer myself, but I understands how much work goes into writing a quality story.

Now, I understand that this book is an ARC, which technically means that the final copy may be very different from what I just read. And for the sake of any reader who actually picks up a final copy, I hope that's the case. There are just so many technical inaccuracies throughout this book that I'm not even sure where to start. That's not to say anything about the actual characters and plot (both of which were subpar.) Just a couple highlights:

The protagonist's name is Hara Isari. We are told she is African American and Japanese American. In Chapter 14, she tells our Mr. Darcy that her name is Japanese and she didn't realize that she wasn't named after the Greek Goddess Hera until she was in middle school. But that doesn't make sense. The names Hera and Hara wouldn't be pronounced the same if Hara was being pronounced as a Japanese name. Also, being the curious person I am, I looked up the name Hara to see what it means in Japanese. 'Hara' is the Japanese word for 'belly' or 'stomach'. I find it strange that her dad would want to name her 'Belly'. Then, going a step further, I looked up the last name, Isari. In Japanese, 'Isari' means 'fishing' or 'searching'. So her name is 'Belly Fishing'. I have to wonder if the author even bothered to do any research before settling on this for her heroine's name.

I'm actually curious why the author chose this ethnic background for her heroine, when the author herself is Puerto Rican. I just wonder if the character would've felt a little more authentic if the author had drawn on her own background to create her. To be clear, I'm not saying that the author isn't allowed to write characters with a different ethnic background from hers, and as a white woman I don't have any place to say whether the representation was good, but I feel like it possibly would've helped. Because this isn't good, and it needed all the help it could get.

There is another character, Kitty. Those who know the story of Pride and Prejudice know that Kitty is one of the younger Bennett sisters. In this book, she's in two scenes and serves as a plot device to get our heroine into a room where she needs to be for the story to move along. She is supposed to be Italian, which I only realized in the second scene (Chapter 11) she was in because when she's leaving she says, "Ciao" to Hara. Earlier in that scene she throws a couple other non-English words into conversation randomly. The only problem is, one isn't an Italian word and the other wasn't the correct word. Kitty is calling someone a whore and uses the word 'punta', which is Italian (and Spanish) for 'point'. A couple paragraphs later she says something about her 'familia', which is the Spanish word for 'family.' The Italian word is 'famiglia'. Then Kitty disappears never to be seen, heard from, or talked about again, so it doesn't really matter I suppose, but this feels so lazy to me.

There's another scene (Chapter 16) where Hara is reading a letter and the letter uses the word 'abeyance'. They use it as a synonym or relation to the word 'obedience'. In reality, this means almost the opposite of what the author intends. The definition of abeyance is: a state of temporary disuse or suspension. So instead of the letter saying 'we would like you to honor (obey to) our agreement', they are instead saying, 'we would like you to suspend our agreement'...

I can't actually point out a character or scene that I enjoyed in this. The romance was too little, too late. The passages from Derek Darcy's POV feel totally pointless. This whole story could've been written without them. Hara is one of the most annoying heroines I've read about in a long while. None of the side characters are anything more than caricatures. There's even a moustache-twirling villain who we're told has an obsession with phallic symbols and it's equated to being depraved and evil.

The story itself is just bad. It bums me out so much. There is a glimmer, just the faintest glimmer of an interesting story. This could've been a fun updated version of P&P, in semi-skilled hands. But aside from a few inserts of quotes from the source material, vague plot generalities, and a few character names, this has almost nothing to do with Pride & Prejudice. Then the end gets so utterly ridiculous and melodramatic that I don't even know how this whole book isn't one elaborate prank. At one point, our hero says, "Am I stuck in a bad cable movie?" And I literally face-palmed. EVEN YOUR CHARACTERS KNOW THE BOOK IS RIDICULOUS!

A couple more WTF moments:

1. We're told several times throughout the course of this book that Hara works for a small-town newspaper in a podunk town (I'll take boring cliches for a million, Alex) and that she is the ONLY full-time employee working at the paper along with her boss. Even so, her boss bought multiple plane tickets for her, ordered her a limousine, and put her up in a super swanky boutique hotel. He also bought her fancy clothes for the trip. Yeah...that sounds like real life in a podunk town.

2.

Hara's father blackmails someone he knows is potentially dangerous in order to get his daughter a job opportunity...where she will be around the person he knows is potentially dangerous at worst and a criminal at best. WHAT?

3.

Hara's friend/acquaintance Naomi learns she's pregnant and that same night Hara and Derek jump into having unprotected sex and there's never even a discussion of condoms or birth control or anything. In 2020? Really?

4. There's a lot of girl-hate in this book. The word 'ho' is thrown around liberally and girls literally fight over shitty dudes. Could we not?


I am so thankful to be given the opportunity to read this book before its release, and I wish I had enjoyed it more.