Rachel Winters

Looks like my romance reading rut keeps chugging along! Here's another one that's centered on the idea of the "meet cute" that we all know so well from rom-com movies.

Will Evie fall in love while trying to force a meet cute to satisfy the whims of the smarmy screenwriter she's been hired to assist? Will her boss fire her for being a bad assistant? Will the screenwriter turn out to be a nice guy after all? Can she make it in the cutthroat world of the entertainment industry?

If you are the type who would pick up this book I think you can guess what happens! It's cute and I enjoyed it.… (more)

Evie's stuck as an assistant to an agent dealing in screenplay acquisitions. She dreams of being an agent herself -- well, actually, she dreamed of being a writer, before she was told that she just didn't have the talent for it. Now she files paperwork and runs errands for one of the most exclusive agencies in London. Unfortunately, the agency is so exclusive that they're about to run out of business if they can't get their star writer to turn in the romantic comedy that he agreed to write. Evie is sent over to get him to sign some paperwork, and ends up entering into a personal agreement with him: if she can prove that romantic comedy meet-cutes really exist, he'll write the screenplay. Now she has three months to find someone through a rom-com scenario -- but things are not working out the way she had hoped...

I enjoyed this book very much. It had the potential to be cringe-inducing, with Evie basically embarrassing herself all over London, but I found myself smiling at her meet-cute attempts instead. Plus, the secondary characters were great -- Evie's friend group is strong, and there's a kid in the story who is neither obnoxious nor precocious. Fans of contemporary romance, especially lovers of the romantic comedy, check this one out!… (more)

Evie Summers has been working as the assistant for a prominent Hollywood agent ever since she gave up on being a writer. Her biggest challenge is Oscar winning writer Ezra Chester who has been assigned to write a rom-com, which is not his forte. Evie and her friends began to call him NOB when she finds that he hasn't even begun to write the script. So to give him incentive, she makes a deal to involve herself in as many meet cutes as possible and report them to him. When she encounters Ben and his daughter for the first time at a local coffee shop, they are witness to a disastrous meet cute.

Would Like to Meet is an enjoyable women's fiction story that includes romantic elements. The character of Evie is well developed, but others are not. So much of the story has to do with Evie's struggles with Ezra, that it's difficult to connect with the rest of the characters and the romance. However, the many meet cutes in the story are humorous and entertaining, but would have been far more effective if they had all been directly related to the romance. One strength of the novel is that each chapter begins with a script style opening to parallel the script being written in the story. Overall, Would Like to Meet is a fairly average women's fiction novel that had potential to be so much more.… (more)