Suzanne Park

This is a enemies to friends romance set in the male-dominated world of video game development. Melody Joo finds herself accidentally running the development for a new mobile game when the company's CEO overhears her having a sarcastic conversations with a female work colleague. Although it was all a joke, Melody's job is on the line and she has to make good or face dire consequences. To further complicate matters, she finds herself saddled with the CEO's nephew as an intern. Although she show more despises the fact that his personal connections got him the job, she soon comes to rely on his laid back competence.

In the background, Melody is balancing a couple of deeply embarrassing parents as well as being the maid of honor for a frenemy. When information about her game that's in development gets leaked to the media, Melody also finds herself unexpectedly in the midst of a social media maelstrom. She's being doxed, trolled and having a spotlight shone on her. While her bosses are ostentatiously holding her up as a shining example of the company's diversity, they are also sabotaging her game's release.

At this time when her life is falling apart, will she find time for love?

I don't know, this book is honestly a bit obnoxious. I understand that the over-the-top racism, misogyny, and generalized bigotry of Melody's workplace is supposed to be comedic, but it just fell flat for me. When this type of behavior is played this way, it tends to make people feel comfortable in their own biases, as no one could possibly see themselves in the behavior of Melody's outrageous CEO and flagrantly offensive colleagues. Moreover, her officemate, Asher, is constantly bashed for his BO and overweight body type which hit wrong for me. There is no sort of bigotry that's acceptable. Even Melody's triumphant interview at the end of the book hits the wrong note. She wants to "set the record straight" and address the accusations of her online trolls. When asked if she's a slut, her response is not that such a label is a relic of the patriarchy, but instead tries to prove she is not a slut by stating the number of people she's slept with. Which... REALLY misses the point.

And, of course, the romance at the heart of this story really comes out of nowhere. Melody is pretty rude to her intern for a long time and then all of a sudden is just, obsessed with him in a pretty objectifying way. She just starts ogling his body at work and mentally commenting on how good he looks in his clothes. They don't have much chemistry and their attraction is not properly developed. I don't understand why they like each other, much less love each other. show less

The main draw for me with this book was the farm setting. Unfortunately the sense of place, the sights, the sounds, the smells (even if they aren’t always pleasant) were rarely as vividly described as I’d hoped. There was more social media discussion and typical summer camp stuff than farm life.

I could have gotten over the disappointment with the setting had the story and characters offered more depth. Like the setting they too felt underdeveloped, the romance, the stereotypical show more depiction of senior citizens and the mean girl, and even Sunny’s ambitions just felt like they scratched the surface. For instance, the entire plot hinges on Sunny being sent away to detox from social media yet while we do know the two things she went viral for, otherwise her social media activity is presented in vague terms, her arguments against college and for an online career never include insight into what she thinks that career will look like, what kind of content she’s passionate about, what her goals and plans are, etc..

There was plenty of potential here, with the farm, with the mother/daughter dynamic, with the truth about the mean girl’s online life, with Sunny’s desire for a decidedly modern unconventional career path but there was never enough information or specificity to give any of it the layers necessary to become as compelling as it could have been. show less

Nate and Kate. Separated by income levels and natural talents, connected by a need to be free, for Nate from the fear of financial ruin at home, for Kate, the need to escape a father who went into extreme authoritarian mode after her mom died. Both feel trapped. When Kate takes a job at the Zombie escape room where Nate is the director of the event several nights per week, they feel something beginning and the more time spent together and commiserating, the stronger the appeal, even though show more their rational selves believe nothing could come from it.
When Kate talks Nate into entering a Zombie Survival Weekend with a $50,000 prize, little do either of them know how it will unwind, but desperation does amazing things, and by the time the weekend is over, the results are pretty surprising as is what follows. I thoroughly enjoyed every page in this book, loved Kate and Nate, hated her dad, admired Nate's parents when they finally explained why their life was the way it was, and found the ending to be very satisfying. show less

I gave this four stars because parts of it dragged and I think Park took way too long to show what happened between Lily and Jake the first time. I don't know if I would have judged him like she did in the end. Also, I don't think that things were really resolved between Lily and her parents, it felt like she blamed Jake a lot more than them and it felt lopsided. I just think in the end, her parents, her sister, were barely in the story and honestly should have been considering all of the show more actions that went on which caused Lily to have her initial incident.

"The Do-Over" follows 30 something year old Lily Lee. She's a best-selling author and about to land her dream job. However, she gets told the job offer is a no go after they find out that Lily did not graduate college. Through calls, Lily finds out she was several credits shy of getting her degree and wasn't informed. In order to get her dream job and keep things under wraps, Lily goes back to college to finish her degree. At college though she meets her college boyfriend Jake, who is now a TA in a class she is taking.

So that's a short summary. I thought that Lily was great and loved the characters of Mia and Beth. Honestly those two needed to have a spin off because I loved reading about them and their antics. But, as some readers said, the romance with Jake isn't given enough time to focus on and we keep going back to the "past" way too much at a certain point. I wish that Park had flipped the order of things and maybe set up what happened way up front so you can get why Lily has the feelings she does about him. But, as I said above, when you do read the whole thing you have to wonder about Lily and her family. They just don't seem to play much into the plot and they should.

There's a sideplot about Lily being discovered and a brother/sister author team and honestly I had zero interest in it and it should have been cut.

All in all, a good solid 3 star romance. show less