Gordon. MacMillan

Tom has always been a hopeless romantic but now he's just hopeless. After the COVID lockdown made him a reclusive introvert it was time, according to his friends and sister, to get back out there. The group sets him up on ten blind dates with the goal of re-establishing his love life. Tom quickly comes to realize just how difficult the dating world is! The dates mostly all have disastrous results and Tom keeps encountering memories of an old flame. Tom soon finds that he must decide if he can date his way to happiness or if his true love has been under his nose all along?
The book starts out with the events that led up to the pandemic with Tom starting to realize he might not like his job anymore. He is also addressing that a close friend will be moving away soon. Most important, however, Tom's best friend Beth confesses her feelings for him and rather than acknowledge his own he shuts down! Fast forward to a year of lockdown and his friends have decided enough is enough! They set him up on a variety of dates that they think would be successful for him.
As each date happened I honestly wondered if his friends were just finding the most insane matches for him to encourage him to go after Beth. I mean literally all of the dates seemed incompatible pretty early on. And he had the one friend who kept telling him he should confess his feelings to her before it was too late. While the dates are terrible it seems that Tom finds a useful take away from each of them, which is nice. (Even if he did go viral for that one)
The book was rather cute and fun. It was a nice look at the importance of friendship and romance. I liked the premise of his friends setting up the dates and not telling him anything until hours before the dates! It really did seem to get him back out of his shell. I will say the end of the book had some revelations that I did see coming and a few that I really did not see coming. If you want a fun lighthearted read which examines change and moving on after the pandemic check out this book!… (meer)

Like that catchy melody you just can't stop humming, once you start this book, you won't be able to stop. Grant it, I’m not certain if Mother's Day was the best day to finish it, or perhaps it was the most appropriate of them all, because it really gets you right where it counts. There's no way to turn your back on it. It's there. It's waiting with an open hand, and hurting heart... and yet all the more beautiful for it.

Johnny was on the road trip of a lifetime. Overseas with his best mate, taking in the lay of the land, never staying in one spot for too long, and making memories by the bucket load. It took a change of mind, a chance encounter, and a whole lot of fate to redirect his stars, but redirected they were for both better and worse. The better comes from his meeting the woman that would forever hold his heart...too bad the time they actually shared in each other's company would amount to hours versus a lifetime. You see, every decision we make, every roll of life's dice, sets us on a new path filled with unseen obstacles, joys, and sorrows. This time around, while things were looking up, they all of a sudden fell like a house of cards. Flash forward several years, and he's found footing again, though I wouldn't call it his own...until a little boy shows up and changes his stars once again, leading him on a journey of the heart he never could have anticipated to an ending that will have you captured heart and soul.

I loved the relationships the author built between the characters, both near AND far...though I shall not elaborate on the latter portion of that comment. Johnny had a support system built into his life that he never dreamed of utilizing in such a way...I mean, unplanned pregnancies are one thing, but to suddenly be thrust into fatherhood six years down the line is a whole other ball game! Without them, his best friends, his mother, his sister, and so on, he would have been much more lost than found...but thanks in part to them, and his own ability to learn as he went, each day may not have been perfect, but they were perfectly content together. It broke my heart every time he was talking with Lauren, reaching out across the miles on the connection they started so long ago. It felt so real, and yet I was so disheartened because they never really had a chance, and there were all these unknown forces that worked against them, yet only each party knew of their own troubles. You just wanted to turn back the clock so they could have their moment in time...but I suppose they did, and while short it poetically spoke to how powerful our connections, our relationships can be...even if only for a brief moment in time.

A wonderful read that will have you in tears, or at least it had me in tears, but will leave you with a smiling heart.



**ebook received for review; opinions are my own… (meer)