Book Review: Swipe Right by Stephie Chapman

Look at me, I’m on a roll! I’ve gotten through another chick-lit ARC but this time I sadly wasn’t hugely into it. Swipe Right focuses on Fran, a twenty-something woman who during an interview meets a very attractive and infuriating guy called Ollie with whom sparks fly that get’s them both the job. They’re both in relationships but still they can’t help falling in love and their time never seems to be right.

I picked this book up on the premise it seemed fun. Timing was never right and even after Fran’s relationship ends, she winds up writing a blog of bad Tinder dates? I love books where the MC is writing on her dating experiences so this should have been so funny and perfect for me. But instead it felt like a slog.

For one thing, it takes almost half the book to actually get to the Tinder portion and then even further for Ollie to leave on his round the world trip. These important plot points mentioned on the summary? Not as focused on as you might think. Which leads to everything up to it feeling like build up. If the characters were better, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But I couldn’t get behind Ollie as a love interest. He was such a dick. Her first boyfriend wasn’t any good either. She needed to get away from his gaslighting. But Ollie takes her ideas at work and runs with them when it’s time to share them, he tells her that straight men and women can’t be friends as even if they aren’t attracted to eachother they’ll still wanna sleep together and even asks her at one point if she’s on her period when she’s mad at him. He keeps doing stuff and then being all ‘oh, I’m sorry I was a dick’ but it’s just too often

“I might have A Type, and that type might well be Bellend.”

Fran in Swipe Right by Stephie Chapman

Yeah, this quote really says it all about the romance in this book.

On the bright side of things, Chapman’s writing was very engaging. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the story, I did keep turning the pages. Chapman has some nice ways of phrasing scenes and some great ideas. This book wasn’t for me but I’m pretty sure I’ll still be checking out Chapman’s later books. I want to see more of her writing as I feel like my dislike of the characters and relationships is just a personal thing. It’s definitely the sort of book that might appeal to other people who don’t mind those aspects of the plot being spread out a bit further than you might expect.

My favourite thing was definitely the working environment. I liked the people she worked with and would love to work at a place like ViralHive. Chapman made the place so appealing and I definitely get people not assuming content work isn’t real work. I haven’t had that very often when I did that sort of thing but people definitely think less of it. Which sucks as it’s actually a really fun sort of job.

So I didn’t really enjoy this book but I did still give it a higher rating than you might expect for the good aspects so that’s:

3 STARS

Amazon UK