* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *
Okay...fair warning here...this review is going to get a little ranty.
The premise for this book sounded good, potentially humorous even. The cover is super cute. I was excited to get started on it. And then I saw the addendum to the title. Really? "A delightful laugh-out-loud romantic comedy" as part of the TITLE? No. That's not okay. As a blurb? Sure. But don't put it in your title. It sounds way too cocky and pretentious. But...I soldiered on and started the book anyway.
First impression? The main character is annoying. She gave ME anxiety with her anxiety. It was all immersive and way too much. Is it accurate for a hypochondriac? Probably. So, points for accuracy. But it still was just hit-you-in-the-face assaulting. I took a few deep breaths and kept reading, despite the heart palpitations it induced.
I settled into the writing a bit more as the story went on and I will admit that Pinotti does have a good style. She is creative and the narrative does move fairly well MOST of the time. There are occasions where the plot just abruptly changes direction and there are times when pieces of the plot dissolve into oblivion. That could use a little work. But when things go in the right direction, the writing is good.
I got this book as an ARC and generally expect that there will be some errors in typography or phrasing (let's be frank, there are doubtless some irritating errors in this very review), but this was way excessive. Sometimes the writing was so jumbled that I had trouble sifting through it. That irritated me. As a reader, I need to know that the author has taken some care with the writing. And some of these errors should have been caught on an initial editing, with ease. When it feels like the author doesn't care about that kind of detail, it makes me care less about the work. A little basic effort goes a long way. I can overlook some punctuation errors here and there or maybe a misspelling and rough transition or two, but this was...to be blunt...an editing disaster. And as much as I should generally ignore these things with ARCs, I just couldn't; because I don't know how much of that is going to get caught prior to publishing.
The storyline at its core was good and I have to assume that there will be/have been some major editing corrections prior to final publication, so I let my rating have a little bit of a bump up. Maybe this is too generous, I don't know.
After fighting the urge on several occasions to DNF and constantly looking at how many pages remained, I did manage to finish the entire book. Was it worth it? Meh. It was okay. There wasn't anything beyond a regular trope and nothing terribly unexpected or marvelous happened. It was pretty predictable. But, with maybe toning down the character in the first third of the book and some careful revision, this could be a decent book that would rate a 3 or 3 1/2 for me. As is, I initially wanted to give it a 1.5. However, I gave that extra credit for the assumed power of the editor and ultimately landed on a 2.
* End Rant *