On a solitary trip to Budapest, astrology and horoscope reading addict Mara decides to have her fortune read. When the teller declares the man of her dreams will arrive imminently just minutes before a gorgeous man walks through the door, Mara feels she must seize fate with her own two hands.
Back home she begins “Project Mara”, a mission to get herself ready for ‘the one’. But the universe has other ideas in the form of her new flatmate Ash. Gorgeous, funny and kind…perhaps destiny has arrived on her doorstep at last.
Will Mara entrust her future to fate or finally trust her gut?
On the whole I really enjoyed this story, even though ‘friends to lovers’ and ‘girl can’t see what’s in front of her face’ are my two least favourite tropes, but Mara Williams got right on my wick!! She was the most self-absorbed protagonist I think I’ve ever come across in this genre.
I loved the story of nurturing the dilapidated lido and rebuilding the community spirit, but I found it really hard to empathise with anything Mara was going through. It seemed she was in her predicament due to her own immaturity and inability to deal with life. I thought the way she treated Ash and her family completely deplorable and found it hard to overlook this.
As for the rest of the cast, I thought they were great. I loved Lynn, Samira and Ryan especially, and think I would have preferred the whole book to be about the election process rather than the main characters love life.
This won’t put me off reading further works by Dent though as I thoroughly enjoyed her debut novel ‘The Summer Job’.
* Thanks to Viking, via NetGalley, for this ARC *