You know, I'll say this for Mathewson: her books are easy reads. I've just finished reading one when I should have been reading books that were due back at the library two days ago, and I zipped through 400 pages so quickly where previously I didn't feel much like reading at all.

That said, I wish I liked her characters more. Particularly, I wish I liked the men more. Zoe, the heroine, is a nice person and I wanted good things for her. But, as with the other Bradfords in the other books I've read in this series, the love interest is a patronising arsehole. It doesn't make it better that he admits to being one - if you know you're being an arse why don't you stop being one? The only answer I can come up with is that he just doesn't care enough about other people to make the effort. That he (eventually) considers Zoe worth the effort doesn't impress me - you can't make up for being shitty to a waiter, for instance, by being nice to your date. I'm using that as an example only, I don't believe Trevor was actually shitty to a waiter here. But, as with his relatives, the way he talks about women he's previously dated is so off-putting. If all your exes are needy, awful bitches then perhaps the mirror might show a common denominator to indicate the problem lies elsewhere, is all I'm saying. (I reckon they were probably all perfectly nice women who got screwed over by this shit and didn't like it, frankly. Listening to him whine about how they tried to control him with food made me think they just stopped cooking for a man who couldn't be bothered to invest even the smallest amount of emotional labour in return.)

He's honestly awful. I mean, he has this secret friends with benefits relationship going with Zoe, because she's too plump for him to want to be seen with in public, basically. And he knows that she is literally starving herself into fainting fits and still he never shuts down his colleagues (and hers) when they make fun of her weight, because they might realise he's fucking her and embarrass him for it. Awful person, and I know I say this a lot when reviewing romances, but I don't care if awful people are happy.

As a bonus, this edition had a novella tucked away at the end about the honeymoon from hell. It was entertaining enough, not as funny as the last hell honeymoon in one of the other Mathewson books I read though.