Are you looking for a sweet, light summer read that includes a kissing booth staffed by a dog? Title’s got you covered.
Plot: Becky was recently dumped, so she’s drinking away her woes in a bar while her best friend encourages her to get over him by getting under someone else. She meets Deke, an attractive guy with a decent sense of humour and it’s on for the night. Becky is a law librarian at a large corporate firm. Deke turns out to be the firm’s newest associate and an intellectual property law expert. So that’s awkward. Especially since he is drowning in work and she is trying really hard to step out of old patterns, which means no more lawyers, and no more workaholic geniuses. Shenanigans ensue.
Much like Title’s other work, this book has a quick, punchy dialogue and comfortably human stakes. It genuinely shocks me that Hollywood isn’t knocking on her door. Her books could absolutely be more diverse (read: at all), but I will say I appreciate how relentlessly feminist they are without being tedious about it. Here’s an example:
“The truth was, Becky wanted to meet the love of her life. She wanted marriage and kids and all those boring, traditional things her feminist heart felt a little guilty about wanting. She wanted equal pay for equal work, too. She just also wanted someone to go home to at the end of the day, someone to cook dinner with and talk about how great it was to be earning the same amount of money.”
I am always wary of picking up books about lawyers that aren’t written by lawyers, but Title does an excellent job of making me believe she’s actually done legal research and docketed time to clients and spent enough time with lawyers to know we sometimes lose the forest for the trees when we fixate on legal minutiae to the exclusion of questions of why we’re discussing these issues in the first place. Even better, she demonstrates this quickly and never talks about it again, because frankly it isn’t very interesting, except this last part which is a sort of existential problem in law and which she handles quite efficiently as well. So don’t worry overmuch about our hero being a lawyer for fictional Monsanto.
Instead, we spend a lot of time at Becky’s best friend’s animal shelter, enjoying every breed and size of dog get loving makeovers and happy forever homes. Did I mention there’s a fundraiser with a kissing booth staffed by a large slobbery dog? How is this not a staple of every… Place? In the world? Airport – dog kissing booth. Library – dog kissing booth. Surely every office needs one.
This book is sweet, it’s funny, it has dogs in it, and it won’t make your feminist heart cringe. If Title makes her books more diverse and she’ll go straight on my auto-buy list.
Content warnings: childhood neglect and dogs being slightly frightened but very quickly given treats and a walk.