While spending the night at her cousin’s apartment, Corinne discovers a new app has mysteriously been downloaded onto her phone. Called Met, the app tells Corinne that she’s already met her soulmate, and offers to bring about four people from her past who were potentially The One. What happens after that is all Corinne’s choice. Except that while one person after another from her past shows up, Corinne already finds herself becoming attracted to someone else, whom she met after the app appeared: her cousin’s friend Cory. Should Corinne believe in the app and wait for it to reveal her soulmate, or should she give Cory a chance?

Have We Met? begins with a cute concept, but the conflict it sets up doesn’t quite hold up for long. For one thing, Corinne isn’t the superstitious type — her friend Elise is much more excited about the possibilities from the Met app than Corinne is — and for another, the first couple of potential soulmates the app sends her barely create a sizzle. The main romance is pretty obvious from the start, which makes the various snags set up by the app seem perfunctory, and the climactic solution pretty predictable.

What I loved most in the novel was Corinne’s character arc beyond the romance. I loved the glimpses of her friendship with Joelle, and I loved seeing her move from grief over Joelle’s death to starting to figure out life without her best friend. There’s a great moment when she first sees the Met app, where she thinks that she’s already met her soulmate in Joelle, and I love that idea of soulmates potentially being platonic.

I also love how her friendship with Joelle, and the mementoes Joelle left for her, helped Corinne figure out what she wanted to do with her life. Corinne mostly just takes on temp jobs almost at random, mostly just to pay the bills, with maybe a substitute teaching job here and there to make her mother happy. So I liked seeing her journey in going after a job that she believes will actually make her happy in the long run, even as she recognizes the financial limitations that particular career path can have.

The friendships were also really strong for me. Beyond Corinne’s friendship with Joelle, I love her friendships with Tiwanda and Elise. Both women encouraged Corinne to go beyond her comfort zone, and most of all, where just there for her whenever she needed support. I love that she found that, even when she wasn’t really looking, and that these new friendships can help her move on past Joelle’s loss.

In contrast, the romance fell a bit flat for me. The two main characters grow close when Cory uses Corinne’s apartment as a workspace — he’s a physical therapist who travels to his clients’ locations, and often drops by nearby friends’ apartments to do paperwork in his downtime. Thing is, he initially drops by Corinne’s apartment unannounced. After some initial coy banter about texting first beforehand, Corinne basically tells him to just drop by whenever. And clearly that arrangement worked for them, but I’d hate this super relaxed approach to my personal space, and the fact that Cory so casually assumed it was okay right off the bat really rubbed me the wrong way.

There was also some cutesy dialogue about the similarities in their names — Corinne initially has Cory in her phone as “The Other Cory” — that got a bit cringey after a while. And the cute form of Cory’s big apology wasn’t quite set up enough for me to work. I get that it was supposed to mimic the academic language of his professional writing, but because we don’t much of this kind of language from him at all, either in dialogue or through his work, the format wasn’t quite as impactful as it could have been.

Still, the book overall was a good, entertaining read. I also love how diverse the cast of characters are: Corinne, Cory, and a few other major characters are Black — there’s a scene involving Cory helping with Corinne’s hair care that I found very sweet. Elise is Asian. Cory is bi — he says so straight out, and when Corinne first meets him, he has just broken up with a man and refers to potential future partners as “she” or “they.” One of Corinne’s potential soulmates is non-binary — they’re a teacher, and the second grade students casually inform Corinne that this teacher uses Mx instead of Mr or Ms. Corinne’s younger brother Lito is Deaf, and the story also touches on the tension between him and non-signing members of their family. The author is a sign language interpreter herself, and there are a few descriptions of signs included in the story.

The end of the novel teases at the potential for a sequel featuring Tiwanda. Tiwanda was a pretty awesome character in this book, and it’ll be fun to see her find her own Met match.

+

Thank you to Thomas Allen for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Enemies to lovers, and grumpy / sunshine are two of my favourite romance tropes, and the fiery meet-cute in The Wedding Game is pretty stellar. Not only are Luna Rossi and Alec Baxter competing on a TV show to win their respective brothers a dream wedding and NYC penthouse, but the first time they meet, Alec mistakes Luna for a PA, and orders her to get him a coffee. Luna spits into his cup in retaliation, and tells him as much, so she can watch in satisfaction as he tosses the cup without drinking.

I absolutely, wholeheartedly, love Alec. He’s arrogant, ambitious, and the grumpiest person on set, but he’s also dealing with the trauma of having had to grow up too young. He practically raised his younger brother Thad by himself, and did his best to shield Thad from their parents’ toxic arguments. Due to his parents’ marriage, he doesn’t believe in love or marriage, and has devoted his career to helping women get good divorce settlements. His motivation for agreeing to do the competition with Thad and Thad’s fiancee Naomi is to support his brother, and perhaps repair the estrangement between them that began when Alec began focusing on his career. Alec, Thad, and Naomi are all complex characters whose dilemmas can sometimes break your heart, and I absolutely adore their family unit.

I also liked Luna from the start, but she took me a while to really warm up to. Part of it, I think, is that compared to Alec, her childhood and family life seemed perfect. She does have some growth to do in the novel — she signs up her brother Cohen and his fiance Declan for the competition against their wishes, which Cohen rightly calls her out on — but beyond that, she doesn’t seem to struggle much until late in the novel, and even then, her fiercely protective best friend Farrah is ready to wage war against those who hurt her, while Luna mopes in her bedroom. 

Luna also does things that the author hypes up for comedic effect, but that turn out being too cutesy to be cute. One major example is when she barks (yes, literally barks like a dog) at Alec in response to something he says, simply because she doesn’t want to speak to him. That was the most cringe-y example, but even milder moments sometimes felt a bit forced. Like when she was literally hyperventilating into a paper bag because she was stressed about confessing to Cohen that she went behind his back on the show, and she knew he would lecture her. I can understand the stress, but also, I wanted to tell her to chill; she’s an adult and isn’t about to be grounded or sent to her room without supper.

The story picks up significantly when Luna and Alec finally become friends. Their banter is cute, and their chemistry hot. They work well together, and I love how they know how to support each other as friends as well as lovers. The scene where Luna holds Alec through a bad time was really sweet. 

I also love how their relationship’s development happened alongside the development of their respective relationships with their family members. Thad and Cohen are wonderful brothers, even if Thad is a bit over-the-top dramatic, and as the future in-laws, Naomi and Declan provide perfect balance to the family units. The biggest conflict had as much to do with Alec and Luna’s relationships with their families as it did with their relationship to each other, and I love how the author took us beyond the romance in showing the most important people in the main characters’ lives.

Overall, The Wedding Game is a fun novel, and the reality show scenes are entertaining. But the heart of the novel is in the families, and I love how Luna and Alec falling in love together also helped them reinforce the love they have with their families.

+

Thank you to Thomas Allen for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The second Lane Winslow mystery takes us to a hot springs resort in the mountains of British Columbia, where a Russian man is found murdered. Lane and her friend Angela happen to be enjoying the springs for themselves, and due to Lane’s childhood in Latvia and history as a British intelligence officer, she is fluent in Russian, and can speak to the dead man’s distraught friend. Inspector Darling and Constable Ames of the Nelson police happen to be the closest law enforcement to the area, and are called in to investigate.

This mystery has a bit more of an international espionage feel than the first, which is probably why I enjoyed the first one a bit more. The investigation delves a bit into the man’s past in Russia, and potential reasons that he may be on the run from Stalin’s government. Personally, I was more interested in learning about the Doukhobors, who appear to be Russian immigrants who are religious pacifists. I wasn’t at all aware of this part of Canadian history, and I found it fascinating to learn how they farmed in the mountains, and clashed with the Canadian government that wanted to take the land they’d lived on for decades.

There’s also a subplot involving an inheritance from Lane’s father. I loved these additional glimpses into Lane’s family, and particularly the dynamic between Lane and her more beautiful and confident sister. I also liked seeing Lane grapple with her father’s legacy, in that he was a spy just like she was, but he was also cold and dismissive towards his family, in part due to his job, and part of the reason Lane wanted out of the business is that she didn’t want to turn out as cruel as he was.

There was also a bit of a minor subplot involving an irritating potential suitor who barrels past Lane’s boundaries. Fortunately, it shifted to a different direction before getting as bad as the unwelcome suitor in the first book, but I hope this doesn’t turn into a pattern for all the succeeding books. Or at least, that Lane gets better at setting firm boundaries with men in succeeding books. She’s a bit too kind-hearted with men who want her time, and I just want to tell her to just say no from the get-go.

That being said, I love how the romance between Lane and Inspector Darling developed in this volume! Darling’s really sweet and respectful, and I like how he’s finally starting to acknowledge his feelings for Lane. I like how they work as a detective team, and how well they bounce ideas of each other. I especially love Ames’ role in this dynamic, and how he says things that Darling and Lane are perhaps a bit too shy to say themselves. I also enjoyed the glimpses into Ames’ various romances, and into his childhood friendships, and I very much look forward to seeing a lot more about Ames’ personal life in future books!

The first book struck me because of its depiction of Lane’s feminism amidst the sexism of her era, and I like how the second book took that theme forward. At one point, Darling comes to her and a friend’s aid, and Lane mentions that she hopes Darling doesn’t think he actually rescued them, as they did most of the work towards their rescue themselves, and would actually have been fine even if Darling wasn’t around. The statement may perhaps be a bit much in a contemporary novel, but given the patronizing attitude another man took regarding rescue in the first book, Lane’s comment here is completely understandable. Darling, of course, understood full well the incidental nature of his role in their rescue, which is yet another reason he’s such a perfect love interest in this series.

I personally enjoyed the mystery more in Book 1, but I loved the deeper glimpses into Lane, Darling, and Ames’ personal lives that Book 2 provides. I’m excited to see how the series continues to develop in future mysteries, and how much more it reveals about Canadian history.

+

Thank you to TouchWood Editions for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.