Morning Everyone,

Happy Friday! Ok, it’s Wednesday, but if you’re in the UK and you don’t work Bank Holidays, then it’s basically Friday. I am so ready for this long weekend. I have no plans and therefore I intend on spending the whole time doing lovely things that make me feel chilled and happy.

Book 📖

Thank you to @bookouture and Ellie Center for this advanced copy of Come Here Often in return for an honest review. Come Here Often was published on 23rd May 2022 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

Kat isn’t a gym goer. She’s not into health and fitness but very much into partying and drinking. Until she decides that the day has arrived to turn her life around. She has all the best intentions; arrives at her swanky health club ready to go. But it all starts to fall apart for her when in the space of minutes, she is dumped via phone and sacked from her job.

Kat’s anxiety gets the better of her and she works herself into a state, telling herself that she cannot leave the health club. So she finds a massage table to sneakily sleep on for the night. But one night turns into two, two turns into three and suddenly, she’s living in her gym.

How long can Kat keep this charade up for? When will her friends and family realise that something is seriously wrong? And will her personal trainer end up being more than just her trainer?

General Thoughts 🤔

Ok. I had high hopes for this book. I was truly in the right frame of mind for a rom com, something that I wouldn’t have to think too much about but could have a laugh with and maybe the odd gooey lovey dovey moment. Unfortunately I really don’t think this should be badged as a rom com. There’s very little romance in it (unless you count the last chapter and the epilogue…kind of) and I don’t really recall laughing all that much.

After the first five chapters I thought to myself, surely, this can’t be it. This entire book can’t be about this woman stuck in her gym. Turns out that it was. I think I could have enjoyed it more if Kat learnt some huge life lessons or really turned a corner, or fell madly in love. But I don’t think any of those things happened really and so for me personally if felt like every chapter was a lady working out and then finding somewhere to hide and sleep.

Characters 👫👭👬

There were moments when I did sympathise with Kat. Anxiety can be crippling and she was obviously seriously struggling with her anxiety but my goodness she did not help herself. She chose the “easy” way out every single time, which ended up leading her to the harder way out eventually. I think I would have liked to have known more about Kat’s history and her childhood, but it was thrown in as more of an after thought as opposed to an explanation of her struggle.

There was potential for some of the characters in the book to be really funny. Lura for instance and Lee from the front desk. I think the author could have really played on these stereotypes and made these characters hilarious, but instead I felt like it just scraped the surface with them and therefore they were just a little bit annoying.

Writing Style ✍️

I’m so sorry to say that I don’t think that this author’s writing style and I are meant to be. We’re just not a good match. I found the whole book quite samey with not very much happening. Then at the very end a bunch of stuff happened which made it feel like it had gotten to a point where someone had said “ok, better wrap this up now”. Sometimes an author and a reader are just not a good match for one another and that is completely ok!

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

If you’ve gotten this far in this review, it is of no surprise that I just didn’t gel well with this book. I thought it was going to be one thing and it unfortunately wasn’t and I feel like it under delivered on it’s potential. Hopefully there are readers out there that have a completely opposing view to mine and I wish the author every success for the future, but unfortunately its an author I will be unlikely to return to.

😍😍😩😩😩