Check Me Out

July 3, 2017
It’s difficult to say who would enjoy this contemporary romance, since the thin, white 20-somethings at its heart are depicted as shallow and self-absorbed, and everyone who’s fatter, browner, or older is made the target of the heroine’s casual cruelty and obliviousness. Greta is an assistant in the quaint Victorian library of Franklin, Ohio. She’s perkily unkind to everyone, including her “best friend,” Will, who is “huge in the way that nobody really wants to be.” Her narrative is Cyrano de Bergerac from the woman’s perspective, told entirely without irony. Will claims to love Greta, but promotes her to his gorgeous cousin Mac because she has “the package” of brains and beauty that Mac wants; Greta reads the cheesy pick-up lines printed on Mac’s T-shirts as love letters aimed uniquely at her; and Mac has no apparent reason other than narcissism to engage in this nonsense. As these three use one another romantically, Greta nominates herself to singlehandedly save the library from the stinginess of the city’s voters, assuming she can take time away from griping about her obsessively matchmaking mother, the longtime senior librarians, the wheelchair users who dare to want an accessible library, and Indian food. She dismisses the humanity of everyone around her—and she’s rewarded abundantly for it. The reader, however, is not.

January 1, 2018
Greta loves her charming, small-town life, including her daily walk to work at the quaint and historic Franklin Library. Despite her dedication to the town, enthusiasm for her job as assistant librarian, and quirky-cute way of communicating, it's hard for Greta to meet guys. So when she asks her best friend, Will, the local high-school civics teacher, to find her the perfect man for her twenty-fourth birthday, it shocks her when he actually delivers. During their romantic first encounter in the poetry section, Greta marvels that Mac seems to check all the boxes on her ideal-guy wish list: handsome face, gorgeous hair, sly wit, and the soul of a poet. But is it too good to be true? Readers will discern far sooner than our heroine that Mac isn't what he claims to be and that Will has been keeping a secret from his best friend for years. Still, Wilhite's sweet contemporary romance is a charmer for readers who enjoy witty banter and a breezy writing style similar to romance-authors Mary Kay Andrews and Donna Kauffman.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)