Much Ado About You

Samantha Young

Much Ado About You takes place in modern day Chicago/ Alnster, Northumberland. It’s a coastal village (even though I can’t find it on a map) that is located on the northeastern edge of the UK. 

Thirty-three year old Evie Starling is done with dating. She is so done with dating, that on her thirty-first birthday, she proclaimed that she would be taking a break from it. Now two years later, her best friend Greer has forced her to get back out into the dating pool. So she meets Aaron on a dating app and they hit it off. When they finally go on a real in person date, he stands her up. When she goes to work the next day where she’s the assistant editor on a magazine, she learns that her bosses replacement that’s coming on after he retires, is a twenty-five year old who just graduated from college. Furious, she quits her job. To top off her misery, her best friend is pregnant. She’s of course so happy and excited for her, but she feels like, like all of their other friends have, Greer is going to move on with her life and leave Evie behind. So, to find herself, she rents an apartment for four weeks above Much Ado About Books in England. With the apartment, she gets to run the store attached. 

On her first day there, Evie is wandering around the village, when a massive great dane rushes past her into the street. Evie sees a car coming around a curve and without thinking, sprints into the street, grabs the dog’s collar, and leaps to the other side of the road, saving the dog. When the dog’s owner rushes over to help, Evie is blown away. Because above her stands a huge, gorgeous, rugged Englishman. Meet Roane Robson, local farmer and dream boat. Now, when Evie decided to go to England to figure out what she wanted in life, she told herself “no men.” That might be a little difficult to maintain when Roane wants to so desperately be with her. Now of course, since this is a romcom, sparks fly. You’ll just have to crack the book open to find out how much they spark and fizzle…

The first 60-70% of the book was slow. I felt like the story wasn’t going anywhere. I had to force myself to keep reading at times, because I knew it had to get better at some point. And it did when Evie and Roane finally got together. I saw their future and it was cute. One of the major factors in this book is the village. There were so many secondary characters, that it got a little confusing. And I realize that the author did this because it’s part of Evie’s character to meddle so we needed to know the other characters. It was just a little overwhelming in the beginning. It also didn’t help that their names either sounded the same or they had a nickname that would be interchanged. The reason for the “breakup,” like in all romcoms, was kind of stupid in my opnion. It seemed too forced and there weren’t many signs throughout the book pointing to the “problem.” 

While I wouldn’t reread this book in the near future, I would still recommend this for people looking for a beach read that doesn’t require much brain power. Keeping it on my shelf.