Hello and happy Wednesday. I was supposed to post this review yesterday but I had stuff (a guy) to do. Today I’ll tell you about Pity Date by Whitney Dineen, and no, I’m not including a link because I don’t want you to read this book. I’m actually going to do an “I read this so that you don’t have to” kind of post. Even if the book was awful, I want to thank NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review it.

I had two major thoughts while reading Pity Date. The first one was that this read like a debut novel written in the early 2010s. Now, it is not a debut novel. The author actually has written many books, which surprised me because this was not well-crafted at all. I’ll expand on that point later on because my biggest issue had to do with the topics covered and the way they were handled. The reason why I say this reads like a novel from ten years ago is because a major plot point is the love interest pretending that he’s gay, or okay, not pretending, but the main character assumes he’s gay and he says nothing to contradict her. That’s bad. That shouldn’t be a plot point in a novel published in 2023. We also have a main character who has issues with emotional eating, and so her best friend keeps commenting on how that might affect her weight and her size because, you know, she cares about her friend. Towards the end we also get a pregnant woman who lies about who the father of her baby is, so that was super tasteful.

I’m not giving this book one star because I don’t care enough about it. I finished it a few minutes ago, and I’m already starting to forget it, but considering there are so many amazing romance novels out there (see my previous reviews), you shouldn’t waste your time with this. Now, my second thought had to do with the plot. Years ago in a review I wrote that it seemed like the author was rolling dice or spinning a roulette to determine the way in which their story would continue. This is what I felt reading Pity Date, like every few pages the author would go “but wait, there’s more” and dump an absurd and completely unbelievable situation that added nothing to the plot or to the relationship between the main character and the love interest.