One night, after helping the H clean up wounds due to him drinking too much, 18 year old h tells H’s mother who tells H’s father who confronts his son about his drinking. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher / author for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review.

This is the same feeling I had when I first read Emily Giffin and made the startling discovery that chick lit didn't have to be vapid--that it could be engaging, intelligent, and introspective. Eleanor has family issues to work through, plus is struggling to get her love life on track and regain her passion for her life and work. This author is new to me, but I must own up to liking her writing style and her willingness to address the brutal nature of divorce, the factors that impact these lives before and after, and the awareness that when writing about real life, there are not often happy endings.She was married to Mike for over a decade, but always harbored unresolved feelings for Patrick, the man with whom she had a brief-but-passionate affair in Vietnam fifteen years ago. Her writing, whilst centering around love stories, often touches on deeper emotional themes such as self-love, healing and the power of finding yourself. The author compares that exciting instant attraction kind of love with dependable, deep friendship love. To be honest, I don't think this book is truly a three-star book, but I don't want to give it two stars either, which would make it seem as if I disliked the book when in reality, I think I'm just more disappointed. Mother of a beautiful daughter, Aimee, she is going through her divorce after 10 years of marriage with Mark.

As we experience these flashbacks of childhood memories it is clear just how much they both mean to each other and what a perfect pair they made so it must of been something drastic to tear them apart?Though her own romantic life has always been fraught with uncertainty, it is her job to forge romantic connections between clients. My first gripe was I didn’t like the book cover (just a “thing” I have) 😀 – think the publishers could have done so much more. If you enjoy dysfunctional characters trying to sort through love to find THE ONE, this is the book for you.

A lot of the time, these kinds of books are as sickly sweet as the icing on the carrot cake I was eating at the time of writing this review but – much like her debut – Last Time We Met isn’t all sweetness and light. The premise peels away the layers that bind our perception of love, loss, family, friendships, and simplifies our understanding of relationships.

She admits to her sister that she is not ‘in love’ with Mike as she can only recognise Patrick as her one true love. Do I really want to have to justify why I am in fact not in a relationship, pretending that it doesn’t feel like a failure on my part that I haven’t bagged myself a loving husband and popped out two children before my body clock times out? While I enjoyed the fairly predictable path taken by this story, I was wrenched out of the story every time someone smirked (smirk or smirked appears 24 times in the narrative). The Love Market is absolutely one of the best Chick Lit novels out there and definitely a perfect read for the upcoming Valentine's Day holiday. Two single friends, most likely surrounded by an ocean of couples taking the concept of PDA to new extremes, look at each other and decide, yeah, OK, why not?