Book Review: Swept Away
You can always rely on Beth O’Leary to come up with a refreshingly original plot. And thank god because while I love romance novels, a lot of them start to feel formulaic. Truth be told, that is why we are there a lot of the time; we like the escapism and the knowledge that we will get a happy ending with our enemies-to-lovers, brothers-best-friend, friends-to-lovers, forced proximity, etc etc etc. The list goes on. But imagine being stuck at sea in a rundown albeit charmingly rugged houseboat with your much younger one-night stand? Beth O’Leary did, and that is the premise of this week’s book.
It isn’t often that my happy books are actually ‘happy’, and while this is one of them and probably one of my favourite romances of the year - it's still early, but there are times when the banter between the characters royally annoys me. I don’t want to come across as a hater, but there are moments when I just went… Lordy no. The thing about banter is you either give great lip back and forth or it’s tumble weeds. Some people’s humour isn’t to everyone’s taste, and that is fine. Cool. Chill. I didn’t always get the humour here, but hay. It worked for Lexi and Zeke, so in terms of the plot, it all worked out in the end.
Without giving too much away Lexi and Zeke were at sea for about 12-ish days. Perhaps it’s the fact that global attention spans have drastically dropped, but I was starting to wonder if they were at sea for possibly 2 days too long. In terms of book length, they spent 3/4 of the book at sea with very little by way of plot happening. Okay, now this is a spoiler, but I didn’t start sitting up and paying attention until Lexi accidentally slices Zeke open with one of the kitchen knives. I think I needed a dose of drama to go “now we’re cooking with gas!” According to my book girlie bestie, it’s because Dark Romance has royally fucked us over and we cannot read anything involving knives, blood, or any type of weaponry again, purely and innocently. Or at least in the way one should read about weapons and knives and blood… You know what I mean.
So I should say something positive about this book because it was really good fun and a wonderfully refreshing romantic read. When one normally reads an age-gap relationship, it is usually with the man being a lot older than the woman, but nope, not this time! Lexi is a lot older, not necessarily wiser and just about kinda sorta getting her life together… but not really. Zeke thinks he is a hot mess but has it a lot more together than he realises. He just has daddy issues. As I said, it’s all in reverse. I should also mention that He is 23 and She is 31, so that’s the age difference, and there’s something rather charming about it. When it is the other way around, with the man being older, there is a subtle suggestion of power on the man’s part. Because why would a 40+-year-old man go for the 20-something girl? Usually power.
To conclude, I would always read another O’Leary novel, but this book was a tad too long in my opinion, but thank god for the happy ending.