Hello book lovers! Today I have a review of an ARC of Not Exactly What I Had in Mind by Kate Brook. It is published Tuesday, June 28, by Dutton. I highly encourage you to read what it’s about and see if it’s something you’d enjoy!
Hazel and Alfie have just moved in together as roommates. They’ve also just slept together, which was either a catastrophic mistake or the best decision of their lives–they aren’t quite sure yet. Whatever happens, they need to find a way to keep living together without too much drama or awkwardness, since neither of them can afford to move out of the apartment.
Then Hazel’s sister, Emily, and her wife, Daria, come for a visit, and Hazel’s and Alfie’s feelings about each other are pushed to the side in the whirlwind of their arrival. Recently returned from abroad, Emily and Daria are excited for a new life in a new town, and ready to start a family of their own.
As the lives of Hazel, Alfie, Emily, and Daria collide, a complicated chain of events begins to bind them all together, bringing joy and heartache, hope and anxiety, and reshaping their relationships in ways that no one quite predicted. Warm, clever, and devastatingly relatable, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind is by turns funny, heartbreaking, and a painfully true-to-life story about family, friends, and everything in between.
Not Exactly What I had in Mind is just that.. something I didn’t really expect. I enjoyed it and it was a quick read, but overall it left me a little unsatisfied. It follows a group of characters, including Hazel and her roommate Alfie, Hazel’s sister Emily and Emily’s wife Daria. Hazel is an illustrator working in a coffee shop and Alfie is a teacher, and the pair sleep together early in the book and awkwardly move on with their lives and don’t really talk about it again.
Emily and Daria are trying to start a family, and both story lines combine as all four figure out all of these important and large hurdles in their lives. It’s very character driven as it focuses on these four individuals and what happens to them throughout the next few weeks and months, and the book covers a lot of deeper, more serious topics. Overall it fell a little flat for me. I dislike the large miscommunication that happens between some characters and how it truly affected the rest of the book. I also felt the epilogue really did not work well for me and almost ruined the whole book entirely in my opinion. I did like the conversations between Emily and Daria regarding finding a surrogate for their baby and the trials and tribulations that come with that process. It was a overall great that I finished in a day and I was intrigued to finish it and see how these characters ended up.
This book is also very British, and as someone who is not British some of the jokes I think went over my head. It was funny though, and I think it’s a book a lot of people will enjoy. Unfortunately for me it didn’t wow me, but it was overall pretty okay to me.
Thanks to Dutton and Penguin Random House for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
Late Night Reading 