(SPOILER non-spoiler at end)

It’s an adorable romantic comedy about a nerdy girl with a combatively conformist mother/family. It made me smile, reminded me of all the good and bad things…. Kelly’s family was a very Bennets of Longbourn kind of family, you know. Hell to live through, but perfect for this kind of book! 🎟️ LOL

…. It’s funny that the unnamed new Taylor Swift song is “annoyingly catchy”. It’s perfect: people like her, but they don’t really like /her/, you know. I went through this phase where I was crazy about her and thought she was a philosopher, and that was almost as culturally inappropriate as someone trolling her, or even not knowing who she is (the first would be bad, but the second would be a lot closer to ‘culturally inappropriate’, you know).

…. Of course, at times it’s so not woke it’s a joke (Swahili is weird; let’s consciously and intentionally pick out fruit out of season), but I guess you’ve got to give Sarah something for her female inventor who can’t get a date or a sympathetic mother, you know.

…. Anyway, it’s technically sci-fi really, but obviously marketed as romance. It’s just inertia and blind willful habit to organize things as ‘technological fiction’ or ‘literary fiction’, or ‘romantic stuff’, just because we don’t like or want to keep separate from other types of people, and from meaningful subjective decisions…. That have to be made, in the end, anyway.

One day you guys will adopt my organization system, and you’ll thank me. And you’ll pay me. 😎

…. Oh how I hated weddings, when I thought I was a wedding person.

Anyway as the imaginaries, the classic mother is very much an Enneagram Two—I help—but since everyone participates in different energies, the heart leans away from the heart, naturally, and the Two goes for Eight—I have power—except in our society the Two doing this tends to be so overwhelmed by the unspoken assumption that she is a broken reed, that it spoils the energy and they play up too much external, social power, saying “I am powerful/I am NOT powerful” in the same savage breath.

Often the Two does better by going to Four, the other edge of the heart that says, I am different, you know. And ironically the Five (the Deep Philosopher) who leans into the heart often leans into that adjacent Four energy: yeah, I’m a little different.

…. I guess it is quietly subversive, albeit without letting the subversives get all their punches in, you know…. Several times I thought that the story was too long and that I knew what was going to happen, but then it would get (lol) engaging.

…. I mean, I totally saw how it would affect her work, you know.

But, what, she was a nut? But I thought it was going to work out! I thought it was good!

I thought it was going to work out!!!! 🤖

Does that make me…. The schizophrenic Aquarius? The one without a, a…. Well. 😸

🤪

I Thought It Was Going To Work Out!!!!

😮

Kelly needs a date to her sister's wedding and is short on prospects. Her bridal shop owning mother is on her case to use her services also. She tries blind dates and dating services and no luck. Conveniently she works at a company that makes robots, so she decides to design and build the man of her dreams causing many uncomfortable and unique situations. This is light, frothy and a quick enjoyable read. ( )

Got this to see how an AI was incorporated into a romance. Ok. ( )

Kelly is in a quandary. She needs a date for her sister’s wedding, but not only doesn’t she have a steady boyfriend, none of the blind dates her family and friends have set her up with has worked out. Being a robotics engineer, Kelly had a wild idea to build herself a robot date. With plans to disassemble him after the wedding, she develops the perfect man for herself, complete with back story. Unfortunately, he is too perfect: she finds herself falling for him. The situation snowballs until it is practically a disaster. The story is engaging and the characters are quite likable. Kelly shows much growth to a more mature person as the story develops. Always book smart, it takes a while for her to develop social skills and assume accountability for her actions. To really enjoy this cute and entertaining tale, the reader should accept as fact a robot can indeed look and act like a human being. ( )

Strong 3/low 4. An enjoyable read built around the idea of a young woman building a better boyfriend and incidentally becoming a better version of herself. This book takes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, combines it with Galatea, and then swaps the genders of the too-work-focused creator and the perfectly unconventional disruptive force. Fluff, secondary coming-of-age, some rom-com level hijinks- but not a romance story. ( )