Hello and happy Saturday. Of course I was going to post a review today, even if I’ve been posting throughout the week. Today, I want to tell you about French Holiday by Sarah Ready. I got this book via NetGalley, so I would like to thank them, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity.

If you’re looking for a romance novel that you can binge-read, this is it. Recently, I have been reading and reviewing several books, and I think I would recommend them to different people, but this is the type of story that would appeal to a wider range of readers. Merry is our main character, and we first meet her when her best friend (whom she’s been in love with for years) is marrying her sister. Noah, the love interest, is also at the wedding because he’s friends with the groom, but at first he seems to dislike Merry, or at least that’s what she thinks.

Besides this emotional and family crisis, Merry ends up quitting her job after having to let go many of her coworkers and friends, when she basically decides to hit pause on her life and go to France to a castle her godmother bought and stay there for three months. Well, guess who’s there? Of course, Noah is because he’s a travel author and he’s there for work, and they both decide that they can peacefully coexist. I wanted to clarify that part because it’s not really a “forced proximity” kind of thing, but a mutual agreement based on the fact that they’re both adults and can act as such.

I think what I liked the most about this novel was the fact that it was self-aware of how tropey it could become, so in a way, the author took advantage of all these tropes and combined them in this funny and absurd story. And I mean, we have enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity, a love triangle…we have everything, and yet, it wasn’t cheesy at all. Okay, maybe a little, but the good kind of cheesy.

One thing that I’ve noticed in two novels I read recently is that the sex scenes are encapsuled in a single chapter, which makes it easier for readers who don’t like them to simply skip the whole chapter. I think this is super smart because it caters to different types of readers, without having anyone miss out on key plot points.