Title: The Love Square
Author: Laura Jane Williams
Publisher: Avon Books
[Synopsis]
She’s single. But it can still be complicated…
Penny Bridge has always been unlucky in love.
So she can’t believe it when she meets a remarkable new man.
Followed by another.
And then another…
And all of them want to date her.
Penny has to choose between three. But are any of them The One?
[My Review]
The Love Square is a fun, sweet read with some deeper moments among the sweetness. I don’t need to re-hash the synopsis for you, but basically our protagonist Penny ends up dating three men who she ends up having to choose between.
I liked that Penny was around my age and, although wanting to meet someone, it wasn’t the be all and end all for her. She meets Francesco in London, where she lives, and instantly knows this is something special, but bad communication and family issues means she ends up having to move to elsewhere in the country, where she then meets two other men who capture her heart for different reasons. All three men are very different, which only seems to make the decision harder for Penny.
I liked that this book offers some very different storylines to that which we often see in books of this genre. It has themes around cancer treatment, infertility, LGBTQ+ relationships, and the widely accepted ‘two parent family’, as well as surrogacy and sexual pleasure – the book really speaks about sex in a positive and, importantly, pleasurable way. I think these important issues, and the way there wasn’t a magic wand to sort out all the problems instantly, made me connect more with the book and with Penny herself.
I did however struggle with Penny’s decision making at times. I felt like I wanted to scream at her to talk properly to people, and then so much of the heartache could be avoided! Apart from that, though, I loved her interactions with friends such as Charlie, Sharon, and her lovely sister Clementine, with whom she seems to have an amazing relationship. I felt like Penny as a character apart from the ‘romance’ was far easier to like and identify with, and seemed much more unique.
The love interests in this book, however, were (on the whole) characters I struggled to like, and their storylines didn’t really do it for me. I don’t want to give too much away but I found some of them a little one-dimensional, and one in particular started off as a positive, likable character but later on in the book behaved in a way which I didn’t feel was OK – or at least I felt that their behaviour should have been more seriously addressed by Penny. The stories all felt a little predictable, which was a shame as this the premise on which the book is based on.
Overall I still enjoyed The Love Square. There are bits I’d have changed a little but it did feel like a fresh release from the contemporary romance genre, amongst a sea of similar books, and the storyline is a fun read – I just almost wish the book could have been about Penny and her life minus the men!
[Rating: 3/5]
Many thanks to the publisher, Avon Books, for providing a copy of this book on which I chose to write an honest and unbiased review.