Mr. Nice Guy

Boy meets girl, boy goes home with girl, girl happens to be a sex columnist and writes a scathing article about boy, boy responds with an equally scathing letter to the magazine. Uh-oh, they both work for the same magazine. It's not hard to see where this story is going, and it does - in a slow crawl. Mr Nice Guy is well-written, at least in the technical sense, which is the only reason for my second star on the rating. However, technical correctness aside, this one does not live up to the hype that caught my attention and made me want to read it. Compared to The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City, a funny and all too real comedy, the ultimate RomCom. Those are just a few of things I saw about this one before reading. I found none of that. Now, maybe it's just my sense of humor, but at just over the 50% mark, I realized that I hadn't laughed even once at this supposedly funny story. Not a chuckle, not even a smile, nada. And on top of that, I was bored. I didn't like the characters, most especially our main characters, Lucas and Carmen. They are both self-absorbed, judgy, and don't seem to care who might get hurt as they climb that invisible ladder to success. Carmen may as well be a prostitute charging by the hour with the way she uses sex to get what she wants, and Lucas, well, Lucas acts like a teenager having a tantrum most of the time. I suppose, when looking at it that way, these two are well-suited. I don't know how they even liked themselves, let alone anyone else. The pacing is slow, and the story is filled with way too much non-essential information. Setting the scene is important, and the reader does need to know about the jobs these people do as well as who they are and how they live their lives, but this one went a bit over the top with that. So, at around the 50% mark and 27 chapters in, I decided enough was enough. I didn't care enough about any of the characters to want to know how their story played out, and the book was just too easy to set aside and too hard to pick back up. Life is too short for that.

3 Stars Review by Elizabeth Late Night Reviewer Up All Night w/ Books Blog Mr. Nice Guy by Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer is a romantic comedy reminiscent of How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days. The blurb had me intrigued to see where the authors would take this. Lucas leaves his home and breaks up with his fiancée to move to New York to work for a magazine. At first, he is a fact checker until he goes head to head with the Sex Columnist, Carmen. Carmen and Lucas have a one night stand which in turn she writes about in her column the next day. Carmen calls Lucas out on his experience which makes him pen a retaliation. Needless to say, that is when things start to take a turn. Even though Lucas is having weekly encounters with Carmen to write their column, he has a sex ‘therapist’ I guess you could say, to give him pointers to improve his moves. The concept for the story was one that had so much promise. Unfortunately, I found myself pushing to finish reading. I was unable to connect with any of the characters. Carmen and Lucas had no chemistry, to me it seemed like it was forced. Interesting concept. I will definitely be checking out more of both authors work in the future. The writing was well done this just wasn't the book for me.