Olga Godim

Keenan is a celebrity, a charismatic TV talk show host and a writer of an extremely popular sex series. He also leads a weekly lunch for women, helping different women at a crossroad in their love life with his ‘male’ input. He wants to help all the women in the world to understand men better. He thinks women complicate matters. He wants to write a book about it.

Tory is a failing psychologist. She is not good with interpersonal communications, dismal with clients, but her educational credentials are excellent. She wants to write a book too. Unfortunately, their publisher only wants one book, Keenan’s, and he suggests Tory co-writes it with him.

Tory is aghast. She considers Keenan a charlatan, a TV-star/conman who rides his fame but doesn’t know anything about psychology. His advices to women are phony, of course. She decides to join his weekly lunches under a false name to prove her point. Maybe then, the publisher would publish her book instead of his.

The premise of this story is extremely silly, but like many of this author’s novels, the book raises interesting and serious questions, and not all the answers are obvious from the beginning. I read it and contemplated my own relationships and those of my friends and family. What makes a relationship work and what doesn’t? How are men and women different? Which mistakes could be avoided and which are almost inevitable?

Like many women in the book, I fancied Keenan a lot. And I happen to agree with his point of view about men, women, and relationship. Sometimes, he makes mistakes, but they only prove he is human and lives down below, among us, despite his ‘starry’ status.

I didn’t like Tory. She seems too dense, too stubborn and inflexible for a woman with psychological education. She is full of insecurities and uncertainties and camouflages them with false bravado and bluster. She criticizes Keenan loudly and publicly, and it takes her the entire book to admit even to herself that she might’ve been wrong about Keenan and many other issues. That it doesn’t take a psychology degree to have insights.

All the while, the story is rolling, the readers are enjoying themselves and laugh occasionally, and Keenan performs as only a star could.

A charming light romance, this book is bound to appeal to anyone for a bit of fluffy fun.