Male romance author falls for female book reviewer.

Book Boyfriend starts out with a great premise. Alex, ditches his terrible day job after his realizes his skill as a romance author and starts writing to support himself full time. Meanwhile, Mia has made a name for herself (well really her alter ego Bookworm Babe has) as a romance reader and reviewer and has a super popular website dedicated to it. She is an online friend and supporter of Lexi Logan, who just happens to be Alex in pen name form. The two don’t know one another in person but bump into each other at the bookstore one day and start dating. Alex eventually realizes that Mia is his online romance pal, and can’t decide if telling her his real identity is worth their potential break up.

This is basically what you’d imagine. It’s an awfully sweet, bordering on ridiculous romance story. There are somethings about this I loved, mostly the length of the book (I think most romances run far too long) and the multiple POV format. Writing in both the female and male perspective helps me to understand characters and their motivations, so I am more inclined to read things with a You’ve Got Mail style switch back and forth. The romance was cute and this was a great quick read to keep on my bedside table to read while my boyfriend was napping.

On the downside, man Mia is an annoying character. She fulfills the role of the “awkward, doesn’t know she’s attractive” trope too well, and I found her awkward fumbling personality to tip into secondhand embarrassment rather than endearing far too often. The amount of times I wanted to shake her and tell her to grown a backbone were staggering. Alex was fine, if a bit boring, but I’d take slightly boring Alex over overwritten Zooey Dechanel in the New Girl wannabee Mia any day.

The other issue I had with this book is while the romance and stuff was sufficiently written, man the sex was bad. I wouldn’t call this steamy at all, not because sex isn’t a factor, there are absolutely sex scenes in this book, but they’re so boring. It’s a lot of telling rather than showing, and I never got a sense of any real passion between the characters, just a lot of sex being written sorta stereotypically. Their first encounter is all mind-blowing and perfect (which never happens in real life) and the next big sexual encounter suddenly turns Alex into this possessive alpha male. Made no sense to me.

Also take a shot every time Alex refers to Mia as “baby” while they’re having sex. You’ll be drunk by the second page.

All in all this was a fine, short read as a palette cleanser between books. I don’t know if I’d read more by the author, maybe, but I definitely wouldn’t read more if the series followed the same characters.

Title: Book Boyfriend
Author: Claire Kingsley
Format: Paperback
Pages: 212
ISBN: 9781544902296

Three descriptions: Romantic, awkward, accessible