The Year of What If

LoveReading Says

Head of a matchmaking company, Logical Love, Carla is due to marry the man she had a high 84% match with in a few weeks time. Yet when her superstitious family get her a tarot reading which seems to show her reuniting with an old flame in Europe, Carla is filled with doubt. Carla will go travelling round the world, retracing her younger self’s steps as she tries to find a man who is not just the correct man, but one she feels fully for too. 

It’s a classic question and motif in romance stories — trust your head or your heart? — and I enjoyed the way Patrick makes this fear feel believable in Carla, that her family are not crazy for believing in various superstitions, and that making decisions based wholly on an equation is distorting reality in its own way. I also appreciated reading a romance where the protagonist and the main characters are older than the usual early twenties — it felt a little more sincere and wistful about marriage when these characters have more life experience behind them.

If you liked this but want a more romCOM rather than romance, I’d also recommend Emma Hughes’ No Such Thing As Perfect, a lively and hilarious novel which follows a journalist investigating a dating algorithm which promises the scientifically perfect match too.

Lily Lindon

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