BOOK REVIEW: Not the Girl You Marry by Andie J. Christopher #notthegirlyoumarry #berkleypub #berkleyromance #bookreview

Marketed as a re-imagined How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days for the millennial generation, Andie J Christopher’s novel Not the Girl You Marry was a fun book  to read, but that ultimately altered too much of the central aspect to the original move to work for me. Still, there’s a lot to enjoy here so let’s dive in!

About the Book

How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days gets a millennial makeover in this romantic comedy by USA Today bestselling author Andie J. Christopher.

Jack Nolan is a gentleman, a journalist, and unlucky in love. His viral success has pigeon-holed him as the how-to guy for a buzzy, internet media company instead of covering hard-hitting politics. Fed up with his fluffy articles and the app-based dating scene as well, he strikes a deal with his boss to write a final piece de resistance: How to Lose a Girl. Easier said than done when the girl he meets is Hannah Mayfield, and he’s not sure he wants her to dump him.

Hannah is an extremely successful event planner who’s focused on climbing the career ladder. Her firm is one of the most prestigious in the city, and she’s determined to secure her next promotion. But Hannah has a bit of an image problem. She needs to show her boss that she has range, including planning dreaded, romantic weddings. Enter Jack. He’s the perfect man to date for a couple weeks to prove to her boss that she’s not scared of feelings.

Before Jack and Hannah know it, their fake relationship starts to feel all too real—and neither of them can stand to lose each other.

Reflection

I don’t want to be too critical here, because I think there are lots of readers who will and already have loved this book, and there were definitely things I liked about it as well! The movie is one of my all time favorites, and this book somehow managed to be almost exactly like it, and nothing like it at all at the same time. It was fun to see what aspects the author wanted to re-imagine. But that brings me to my first point, and one I couldn’t have anticipated until I saw how it had to play out…

The gender reversal of the original story was a really fun idea, but one that did not work for me. When I read it, I felt sick to my stomach seeing Jack emulate the kind of toxic, misogynistic behavior that men treat their partners with all of the time. It wasn’t cute, or easy to stomach. The original worked because they both in some ways pretended to be into one another but didn’t realize that they actually were. Here, I struggled watching Hannah pretend that Jack’s bad behavior wasn’t a problem. I didn’t like watching her “play it cool” when he did truly appalling and damaging things. I also felt like I struggled to see Jack as the nice guy that he was, when he was treating Hannah so poorly. It made him feel disingenuous and I was left with the impression that he thought way more highly of himself than he deserved.

Let’s talk about Hannah for a moment. I loved her, and I loved that the author chose to make her biracial. We saw quite a bit play out in terms of how some biracial women may experience dating, and I thought that as great to see in a main stream contemporary romance novel. Hannah herself is tough on the outside, but vulnerable inside. I also loved her friendship with Sasha, who was a really fun character as well. And I think these two are where Christopher’s writing really shone in this book! I also have to say, the event planning space was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the story of the wedding she was trying to help plan.

Many of these scenes were almost exactly out of the movie, and I think that’s where you see some readers saying this was too much like the film. I thought those scenes were a lot of fun. For instance, in the big party when everything comes to a head, I thought it was a fun re-telling of the original movie.

The problem is, I learned through reading this that delving into the mindset of the two main characters reveals a troubling aspect that the film was able to gloss over. Here we see chapter after chapter of how much these characters like one another and don’t want to go forward with their manipulation. Over and over and over again. And yet, they still do it. And somehow, seeing how much they didn’t want to do it took a bit of the fun out of the plot for me. The movie worked because neither had real feelings at first. They met because of their work assignments. Here, they actually meet and form a connection before their assignments, and it bothered me.

Let’s get to the steam—there was quite a bit of it! I don’t mind some steam in books, but this one had a vulgarity to it that just didn’t resonate with me. Maybe a bit too much bluntness about some private aspects of people’s body parts that I just didn’t need. The sexual tension actually seemed to be the main driver of the plot here, and it left the whole book feeling like a fifty-shades-of-gray fan fiction of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. In the original movie, the sexual tension never felt like a key driver of their behavior.

So what to make of this? Here’s my take: this is a fun idea for a book and it will work well for many readers. In every way that the movie put the “com” in rom-com, this went the opposite direction, and I think a lot of contemporary romance readers like when the steam level is ratcheted up as it is in this book! For me, I think because that was so different from the original story, it didn’t work as well. But that is just one reader’s opinion. There was also a lot that I did love about this book!

Thank you to Berkley for my copy. Opinions are my own.