Book Review | The Love Square #20booksofsummer22

Book twelve of my summer reading challenge and switching back to romance.

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The Love Square
Laura Jane Williams

She’s single. But it can still be complicated…

Penny Bridge has always been unlucky in love.

So she can’t believe it when she meets a remarkable new man.

Followed by another.

And then another…

And all of them want to date her.

Penny has to choose between three. But are any of them The One?

The bestselling author of Our Stop will have you laughing, crying and cheering Penny on in this funny and feel-good exploration of hope, romance and the trust it takes to finally fall in love. 

Bookshop.org | Goodreads | Amazon

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This is my second Laura Jane Williams book and I knew it would be an enjoyable read but was very interested to see how this story would play out, I felt going in that it could be a situation that could be very high drama but I was hoping that given how I felt about the last book by this author that it would be handled without it being sensationalistic, which thankfully turned out to be the case.

I found Penny to be such a relatable character, she is someone who feels pulled by different obligations and ends up living for other people just because she doesn’t want to let those in her life down but ultimately needs to get back to looking out for herself to be happy. I think what I loved the most about Penny’s character is that she actually does know herself really well, obviously, the extraneous situations mean that she starts to doubt a lot of things in her life but when it really gets to the heart of the book everything that she knew about herself still stands, and I love that it comes back to her knowing exactly what she needs.

The relationship between Penny and her sister Clementine was terrific, it was one of my favourite things about the book, they are so close even though they don’t see each other all the time and they spend more time catching up through messages and voice notes. I like that it showed that you can still be a close family without having to be on top of each other and that in the case of their wider family, that you can choose who you include and exclude as your family and still have that intense connection.

I enjoyed the budding romance between Francesco and Penny and then as things changed I liked that they remained friends as she explored relationships with the other men that come into her life. I did like that there were some different types of relationships depicted in the book and for the most part it seemed like there was no judgement on them, however, I noticed that people kept equating the fact that Penny was only part of these relationships because she was unhappy with her self.

I think that could be true of some of her actions whilst she pursues these relationships, lack of communication and honesty, I wasn’t always keen that it was portrayed through the relationships themselves. Also, I think there is something about featuring real celebrities in a fictional book that I don’t think works for me, I love Lizzo but I didn’t love her in this, it was just a little bit weird.

I went into The Love Square thinking it would be a little bit more light-hearted than it was, but I enjoyed the exploration of Penny’s relationship with her family, with herself, and yes the men were an interesting addition too.

Reviews of other books by Laura Jane Williams
The Lucky Escape