Synopsis
Beach Read meets Sweetbitter in this laugh-out-loud and ultimately heartwarming debut of a good friend’s very bad decision and the summer job that stands to ruin or make her life.
What if you could be someone else? Just for the summer…
Birdy has made a mistake. Everyone imagines running away from their life at some point. But Birdy has actually done it. And the life she’s run into is her best friend Heather’s. The only problem is, she hasn’t told Heather.
The summer job at the highland Scottish hotel that her world class wine-expert friend ditched turns out to be a lot more than Birdy bargained for. Can she survive a summer pretending to be her best friend? And can Birdy stop herself from falling for the first man she’s ever actually liked, but who thinks she’s someone else?
One good friend’s very bad decision is at the heart of this laugh-out-loud love story and unexpected tale of a woman finally finding herself in the strangest of places.
Review
The Summer Job by Lizzy Dent
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I laughed so much with this, really a clever book. It’s a great summertime or off season escape to the beach type of read. Would recommend it to anyone looking for such as there is a lighthearted centering, but with some depth of character that goes into deeper issues that some readers may relate to or find interesting to read about.
The Story
The GQ description says it all, so funny. The overt tasks and nuances of the hospitality industry was great. I loved the storyline in general. I liked the side story of character, though half way through I sort of got impatient in reaching the end because so much was built upon it that it felt a bit top heavy, rather than a story I wanted to sink into at the depths when it started to become overtaken with the minutiae of events that felt very drawn out.
The Writing
The story was depicted well with this ease of casual, natural conversation in dialogue. It did become a lot more conversation amongst characters and detail about events than I was in the mood for. Chit-chat about minutiae where the characters took a long time both in action and goal, this drawn out path to this center of the story that I sort of lost interest in half way through and decided to skim read the rest.
I would like to try another book by this author as this one started strong but ended a bit weak for my tastes, outside this, the elements of what I would typically enjoy were most certainly there.
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