Chicklits work best if you like the main characters. The girl should be someone your recognise yourself in (to some degree) and the guy should be someone you could be attracted too.

I liked Polly until about the third chapter. Then she took a job to photograph food for an instagrammer's cookbook for free. What? She wants to make money as a photographer. She should not be giving her work away. An instagrammer's cookbook is likely to become an insta-hit. The instagrammer can afford to pay for the photos. And this turns out not to be the first time Polly is offering her services for free or very little on the promise that actual paying work will come out of it for her.

I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Favours you do for friends; not for people you barely know.

So it's probably a good thing Polly gets offered the job as a matchmaker. She clearly doesn't have a very good commercial head. Which is further evidenced by the fact that her first job as a matchmaker is to find some good photos for a clients dating profile. How is it not the first thing (okay, maybe after a short scroll through the client's Facebook page) she tells her new boss: I'm a photographer! I can take very good professional pictures of this client. I can make him look desirable. (I don't know whether she can, but that's probably how she has to sell this thing to her new boss.)

Alas, no such action from Polly and my mind starts wandering to writing my own chicklit. One where the heroine is more kick-ass and in control (and still makes a mess of her love-life).

As for the love-interest: sorry, not for me. Not even for his age or the age-difference with Polly, but because he is a businessman that meets his clients with rolled up shirt-sleeves showing off his artwork. To me, that doesn't look very professional - neither the tattoos nor the rolled up sleeves. In business it's better to overdress (and I say that working for a company where the dress-code is very relaxed. Still, we roll down our sleeves when meeting clients.)

But aside from not liking the main characters much, there was also barely any romance between them. They meet a few times and Polly for some reason fancies Olly. The forth time they meet, Olly tells her he was chatting with her on behalf of a client, while she was chatting on behalf of a client of hers, and they decide they like each other and should go on a date. A date that is spent the whole night talking and not making out (kind of hard to believe if she really fancied him). Then her boss tells her Olly is a cad and Polly decides to believe hear-say rather than hear the other side and ignores Olly for a week or so until she learns he's quitting his company.

Everything is happening too fast. There's no build up of the romance. I don't see the back and forth attraction and the big fall-out (there always should be a fall-out; I guess that's what makes the relationship stronger in the end) is something that could have been sorted about by replying to a text. What do you mean 'big' fall-out? Pretty much everything I like in a chicklit was lacking.

What was also lacking - and I never knew this was going to be something I was going to notice - Polly only has one heart-to-heart conversation with a female friend. One (1!) in the entire story.

And one final gripe: there is absolutely no reason for this story to be set in New York. It might as well have been set in Manchester for all that it showed of Manhattan. Nothing, save for some name dropping. The story didn't even remark on winter in New York, even tough it is set in February. There was a distinct lack of people being cold or wearing wintercoats and gloves when outside. It also would have saved the author getting the time difference wrong. England is ahead of New York time. So when it's 4 a.m. in England, it's 11 p.m. in New York. I doubt that would be regular office hours for Polly.

1.5*, but rounding it down because of the last chapter. That was too much lessons learned.

I read a copy of this book through Netgalley.