Review: When Polly Met Olly

Book Review: When Polly Met Holly, by Zoe May, 3 stars


 ✩✩


Polly might spend her days searching for eligible matches for her elite list of clients at her New York dating agency, but her own love life is starting to go up in smoke.
Even worse, she can’t stop thinking about the very person she’s meant to be setting her latest client up with… surely it can’t get any worse!
But then Polly bumps into oh-so-handsome Olly, who heads up a rival agency, and realizes that perhaps all really is fair in love and dating war…


Genre: contemporary romance

Publication date: January 2019

Mature content: no

Review: I was really excited when I started reading this book. From the synopsis I had the feeling that the plot was fairly original. And, honestly, the first 1/3 of the book was really good - interesting, funny and fast paced. But then things got a muddled. Not much happens after Polly actually meets Olly. There's a lot of dialog, there's a lot of introspection and a couple of other random encounters with Olly, but not much more. Frankly, it gets boring. Even the happily ever after is just lukewarm. 

I had zero affinity with Olly. He sounds totally fake, even when he's trying to convince Polly he's a new man. And there's no way anyone is going to convince me he loves Polly after meeting her three or four times, when on over half of those she was pretending to be someone else. It doesn't really matter that they chatted online - while, mind you, both pretending to be someone else too. 

And on top of that, there's one additional detail that bothered me. When any of the characters speak, then rarely say things, reply, come back to someone, comment, or any other alternative you want to think of that represents a dialog. Mostly, they "enthuse". Now, the first time I read it on the book I found it kind of funny and original. But after reading at least one enthuse/enthused/enthuses in nearly every page, it becomes annoying instead of original (really annoying, if you ask me).

So, I can't actively recommend When Polly Met Olly. Which is kind of sad because I read other Zoe May books before and they were way better than this one. I'm rating it with three stars simply because I loved the first part of the book, but it doesn't deserve more than that.

Have a wonderful weekend,


The Book Worm, book blog



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