Review: Just Haven't Met You Yet, by Sophie Cousens

A fine romcom - nothing spectacular here, but it was more of me eye-rolling than me actively disliking any of the tropes or the component parts.

Very basically, this is the story of Laura Le Quesne, a blogger for a website called Love Life. She does interviews with couples who have interesting meet-cutes, and then goes to Jersey in order to write an article about her own parents' love story. She accidentally leaves the airport with the wrong case, becomes convinced the man who actually owns the case is her soulmate, and then meets a cab driver who throws a wrench in her plans for soulmate- and self-discovery.

There were some very funny bits in the dialogue, and the narrative arc of the novel as a whole worked fairly well. Laura as a main character was also an enjoyable head to be in, although I do think her journey of self-discovery was very superficial and the bits of it that would have worked as an important emotional arc were left completely by the incidental wayside, but that is the danger of romcoms - any moments of actual emotional depth always do seem to happen fairly accidentally rather than being deliberate authorial choices.

My main issue with this book is that it was 100 pages too long - the last bit of emotional tension, the sudden reemergence of Ted (the cabdriver's) ex-wife Belinda, came out of nowhere and seemed to exist purely as a way to add 50 extra pages of back-and-forth to a novel that really didn't need it in what felt like the appropriate moment to start wrapping everything up. It did mean that a moment that deserved adequate space and weight was given neither of those things, and was wrapped up almost as quickly and randomly as it was introduced.

The sex was good, but could have used more of it.

Basically it was just a meh book - the premise of it was better than the actual reading of it; but it was fine. Nothing stood out as either bad or good. Might be the last Sophie Cousens book I pick up, though.

Happy reading,

Amélie xx