Wendy Darling's Reviews > Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake

I didn’t love this the way so many seem to.

— The first quarter of the book is most of the romance. The rest is mostly centered around her unexpected pregnancy, which is a trope I don’t necessarily mind, but it’s just so not rewarding here. So much negotiating, so many misunderstandings/minor scenarios to be navigated, and endless logistics I didn’t care about.

— He’s pretty appealing, but really seems too good to be true. His fairly immediate acceptance of the situation and uprooting his life so quickly to move to another country after a two-night stand seems fairly sudden and unbelievable.

— She chooses to have the baby. His ex terminated her pregnancy/became distant/didn’t tell him/was also cheating. While I don’t necessarily think the author meant to do good girl/bad girl or to demonize abortion, the fact remains this is the scenario presented. Even if there was an abortion that left him conflicted—isn’t that enough to break them up without the emotional distance and infidelity? It just felt like piling on, even though this character is absent and not even mentioned that much.

— Honestly, at the risk of sounding unsympathetic, it’s also really hard at times to enjoy being in Lizzie’s head. I appreciate the attempt to show a neuro-diverse heroine, but in the context of a fluffy rom-com, the efforts to make it exactingly realistic added to her determinedly quirky, strong (sometimes aggressive) personality, compounded by the choice to have her be wildly accident-prone, unable to cope with everyday life, etc. added up to a pretty exhausting read. And at one point, she literally blurts out at a restaurant that her boyfriend has a huge dick, and at another function—for his work, where his boss is present—she writes “Sek C.Baudy” on a name tag. (It was a mixup that it ended up on her chest, but still. And then she causes trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres to crash down.)

Actually, how you react to those two things probably is a good indicator of how you’d feel about the heroine and book as a whole. To me, this had its moments, but overall it was never as funny or charming as it wanted to be.

I was in the mood to read a romance, and I’m usually able to follow where authors want to take me, but here, there just wasn’t enough payoff for me in terms of the characters or relationship to make it worthwhile.