Elena Reviews: Meet Cute By Helena Hunting

 Title: Meet Cute

 Author: Helena Hunting 

Publication Date: April 2019

Genres: Contemporary, Romance

Talk about an embarrassing introduction. On her first day of law school, Kailyn ran quite literally into the actor she crushed on as a teenager, ending with him sprawled on top of her. Mortified to discover the Daxton Hughes was also a student in her class, her embarrassment over their meet-cute quickly turned into a friendship she never expected. Of course, she never saw his betrayal coming either...

Now, eight years later, Dax is in her office asking for legal advice. Despite her anger, Kailyn can't help feeling sorry for the devastated man who just became sole guardian to his thirteen-year-old sister. But when her boss gets wind of Kailyn's new celebrity client, there's even more at stake than Dax's custody issues: if she gets Dax to work at their firm, she'll be promoted to partner.

The more time Kailyn spends with Dax and his sister, the more she starts to feel like a family, and the more she realizes the chemistry they had all those years ago is as fresh as ever. But will they be able to forgive the mistakes of the past, or will one betrayal lead to another? 

It's been a while since I've written a review, so it's high time I got back to it... Time to share some opinions! So, I usually read something on the academic spectrum and then switch to a lighter, fun read that will help me relax. Romantic comedy is my go to genre at the moment, mainly because I'm out of cozy mysteries, so any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! I picked up Meet Cute in the hopes of letting go for a while and just getting immersed in an easy read that would make me laugh and swoon, right? Well yeah, that was the plan.

I didn't really hate this novel. I just feel like it didn't manage to reach my kind of normal, I would say, expectations. It fell a bit flat and didn't manage to keep my interest for long. Truth be told, it was quite predictable, in a bad way. Cliché romance novels often are, obviously, but this one I didn't enjoy reading that much. I usually don't have high standards when it comes to looking up books I want to read for fun, in the sense that I know they won't be anything I haven't personally read or come across before. Having read hundreds of books, well, that's to be expected. But I don't mind predictable storylines, as long as they're fun to get through and interesting to read. 

Meet Cute started off as a pretty exciting rom-com that I got fully immersed in, actually. Then, it kind of faded into this sense of, is that all? The second chance, hatred to love kind of trope has been around for a long time, but how each individual author handles it makes all the difference. In this case, Helena Hunting could have done so much more with it. I'm not going to get into the details of the plot itself, you can read the synopsis for that if you're interested in giving it a shot. But of course, there won't be any spoilers or references to particular scenes that might give off what happens throughout the novel. It does deal with some serious subjects that could be a trigger for some people, but nothing too descriptive. The problem is that the writing itself did not do them, the characters and the plot itself any justice. I felt like it focused on the surface and didn't really dive in too much when it came to the relationship between the main characters. 

The dialogues felt more forced than anything, as the story progressed and the author focused so much on describing things that, for me, were of no importance to the overall plot or the events that took place in the novel itself. Combined with the fact that the characters' backstories weren't convincing enough and there were no in depth explanations on their feelings or thoughts, meaning that the author didn't focus on them as much as she should've to make them relatable and explore their personalities in a way that made them appealing to read, Meet Cute was kind of disappointing, to say the least. 

The writing itself was quite basic and didn't offer much in terms of character development. The story is told by both Kailyn and Daxton's perspectives, which didn't make much difference for me. The fact that their inner monologue was kind of repeated instead of explored more, which would've created a more interesting path for the story to follow, made all the difference for me. I really don't have anything positive to say, just because I started off by truly enjoying this novel, but was left with a sour feeling of it not being enough for my personal taste. It did have a lot of potential, which is why I couldn't really rate it with less than 3 stars. It was a light and easy read, if you're looking for something to entertain you, but it lacks depth and focuses of things that aren't really relevant to the plot, instead of building on top of what was already there.

Until the next post,