I really don’t know what to say. Cousens let’s you know the inspiration behind this book when she is done and she lets you know she struggled with this (yeah I can tell) and she’s trying to have it both ways. This just had too many science fiction elements that were not well thought out and the actual romance between Chloe and someone else took too long to build. I honestly do think some parts of the book did work (when Chloe finally realizes and is told what a terribly absent friend she has been for 10 years) and her working her way through that. The science fiction stuff should have been cut way back and or include the darker parts of the entire concept instead of saying well I wanted this to be a romance so let’s ignore that. I think it’s especially egregious since we right now in the news have a ton of real life cases about this very subject that went poorly.
Also, I am going to totally judge her for using ChaptGPT to write one of the epigraph sentences. It definitely feels like Cousens is pro-AI though some characters in her books are against it. The whole book was maddening.
And Then There Was You follows 31 year old Chloe Fairway who is stuck in a job she doesn’t want and is reeling over a breakup from a year or so earlier. When Chloe gets notified about her 10 year college reunion, she worries that unlike everyone else, her life has not been a success and she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. Chloe gets told about a dating service called Perfect Partners and then she meets the perfect guy, Rob. But of course not everything with Rob is perfect and there’s a huge catch about what she’s willing to accept if she wants to have it all.
I don’t even know what else to say except Chloe was not very well developed until 3/4 of the book. I could not put my finger on it, but once you start to get everyone’s else’s side to her I said yeah, she’s not a great friend. Her focusing on not being a success and a successful screenwriter seemed way down on the list of things she needed to fix about herself.
I won’t even get into Rob.
The secondary characters are not given a lot to deal with like Sean, Johh, and Akiko. We get flashbacks and present day stuff, but as I said, it just shows Chloe wasn’t that great as a friend. There is very little chemistry IMHO between her and the guy she ends up with. I needed more romance and it felt a little too tacked on in the end.
The ending was a HEA which is good, but again, I didn’t think that we got enough there to set that up. And then we have after the ending when Cousens gets into her Author’s Note on Writing and [Redacted] and I was like ehhhh. I just thought it was a cop out myself.
