Can genetics help you find love? Consider me unconvinced.
Plot: Jess has had a rough time of it in the love department and between work and raising her kid solo, she doesn’t really have time to date. But there’s a new app on the market that promises genetic compatibility and her best friend convinces her to send in a sample. When it comes back, she’s matched at 98% with the founder, which, like, sus, right? But the company really, really wants to use this as a photo op and prove to the world their app really works. It’s not great news that they have already met and were not impressed with one another, but they offer her money to just try getting to know the guy for a few weeks and see what happens. Money’s pretty great. Shenanigans ensue.
This was sweet. Honestly, the real issue I had with it was that it left no impression on me. It has been a few weeks since I read it and I had to read about five reviews before I stopped confusing it with another book. There is nothing objectionable in it. The side characters are funny. The premise is meaningfully explored, it’s not just a set up that is promptly ignored. For some, I should note, it was too meaningfully explored. There’s a lot of science talk in this one, folks. I’m a fan of that, but I’ll be honest and say that at times it felt like filler to bulk out the book rather than genuinely relevant to the story. People seem pretty torn over whether they like the final conflict, and I’ll say I found the inciting incident really interesting and actually made me buy into the story retroactively a lot more but River (the founder) always felt like a two dimensional romance hero rather than a person, who was sweet when the story needed him to be, and an absent asshole when the story needed him to be, and it made the conflict and resolution feel really unsatisfying when I think it had the potential to be much more.