Book of the Week: The Soulmate Equation

Oh it’s another contemporary romance book pick. Two weeks in a row. It was Valentine’s Day, it’s allowed. The fact that it’s Christina Lauren again, just a few months after Something Wilder got a mention in a Recommendsday and not a year since Roomies was a BotW pick, is less allowed. But it’s my blog and I make the rules so I can break them too.

This is a sort of enemies to lovers but definitely fake relationship romance featuring single mum Jess. She doesn’t date because she’s too busy keeping all the balls in the air – being a single mom, her business doing data and statistics, keeping a roof over her family’s head and looking after her grandparents. Her best friend Fizzy buys her a kit for a new DNA-based matchmaking services for her birthday and in a moment of weakness she submits her spit sample. Which turns up the highest match the company has ever seen – the trouble is the person the algorithm says is her perfect match is the company’s cofounder, Dr River Peña, who she already knows she can’t stand. But soon the company is offering to to pay her to see if she’s wrong and she finds herself spending more and more time with River and starts to wonder if there is something in this matching thing after all…

This is a delightful treat of a romance. It’s told purely from Jess’s point of view, which I started off by finding frustrating but after about fifty pages I didn’t mind because it meant you really didn’t know what was going on with River and whether he was falling for Jess or just playing along for the sake of the company. Jess’s daughter Juno is just the right side of romance children (and it’s a difficult line to tread) and I loved the set up with the apartment building with Jess’s grandparents in the bungalow in the garden.

I’m not a numbers and figures person (I dropped all maths and science just as soon as I could because I wanted to do languages and history) so I can’t speak to the accuracy of the data and stuff, but it made sense to me without losing me in the technicalities and detail. This is another fake relationship Christina Lauren (like Roomies was) and has no pranks or any of the bits of their novels that sometimes don’t work for me, so if you’re not a humour from embarrassment person, I have good news for you, this is safe to read.

I got this off the pile last week because when I was reading up on the next Christina Lauren for last week’s upcoming books post I discovered that the heroine of that is the aforementioned Fizzy, Jess’s best friend who a romance writer and thought I ought to read Soulmate Equation before that came out. And I’m glad I did because it’s great but I’m also now even more excited about The True Love Experiment than I was before.

I got my copy of The Soulmate Equation from either the supermarket or the Works, I can’t remember which, but it’s all over the place – I saw it in Foyles the other week any everything. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo and all the usual ebook outlets too.

Happy Reading!