‘Joyful and romantic!’ COSMOPOLITAN
‘Full of delicious food, real kindness and sexy men… what’s not to like?!’ BETH O’LEARY, bestselling author of The Flatshare
Men are like buses. You wait for one… 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. Perfect for fans of Mhairi McFarlane’s Last Night and Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare.
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A thoroughly modern love story. Smart and emotional — I couldn’t put it down.
It filled my heart with joy and eclipsed everything else going on in the world.
Fresh, funny and smart, The Love Square celebrates the messy joy that is modern love. It’s full of delicious food and real kindness and sexy men… what’s not to like?!
Charming and full of warmth. I loved Penny (and her hair), and laughed a LOT at her misadventures. This is the book equivalent of a big hug.
Fresh, warm, and honest, The Love Square is a refreshingly different take on modern relationships.
Clever, hilarious and a total unbridled joy to read, get it now or prepare for the impending FOMO this summer when everyone else is talking about this brilliant book.
Fresh, funny and full of heart. I fell in love with Penny Bridge.
After surviving cancer in her twenties, Penny is looking for love. Unfortunately she has a hard time finding it. When a man delivers bread to her cafe one day, she gets his number. When a family emergency occurs, she is forced to leave this new love behind and go help her uncle. Will she ever get what she wants?
Opinion
The book was a bit slow to start but by the end was a page turner. I literally laughed out loud at some points and wanted to slap characters at others. This book will pull emotions out of you and will make you pause to think.
Many thanks to Edelweiss Plus for providing me with an ARC of this book.
Penny Bridge wants to find the one man that makes her heart skip a beat, the one man she can spend the rest of her life with… but finding him has proven to be quite difficult. While everything in her life seems to be on track, her love life is anything but. She just ended things with her boyfriend, and now has also met a few other perspective candidates, but the likelihood of them being her one remains to be seen…they are all decent men, but are they the right one?
The Love Square is an emotional and dramatic tale about one woman and the few men who are vying for her heart. Penny has a career, good friends and family to support her, but she feels like she is missing love in her life. She wants a man that will truly sweep her off her feet and leave her never wanting another… but that last part has been a bit tricky to find. Sure she has dated, but most of them never make it past a couple of dates, because none of them are looking for a forever kind of love.
Her love quest is filled with many emotional ups and downs, and at times it feels as though she will never find the soulmate she is looking for… but it eventually happens. And that is when your heart will feel a bit of a squeeze and true happiness for Penny settles in. This was a delightfully penned tale, with quirky characters, and serious life topics that were handled with care. I enjoyed what I found between the pages here, the words made me smile and gave my heartstrings a nice little tug! Highly recommend!
I requested an advanced copy of this title from the publisher and I am voluntarily leaving my honest and unbiased opinion.
What a lovely fun twist on a modern romance! Penny Bridges starts out with absolutely zero romantic prospects but quickly finds herself, to some extent involved with three different men. From start to finish i was on the edge of my seat wondering where the story was going to take me and never quite knowing who are heroine was going to end up with but I was so pleased with the result. The completely non-traditional HEA with her family of choice was the absolute best way for this story to end. As I read this book I found myself both laughing and crying with heartfelt tears for my heroine as she put herself out there to figure out what she truly wanted. One of my absolute favorite things was the inclusive of strong confident male characters who weren’t afraid to express how they felt.
Although they were not the two main characters, this book gets major points for including strong representation from gender non-binary and LGBTQ+ community.
One thing I had a hard time with was the scene changes felt a bit abrupt where I wasn’t quite sure who was in the new scene and or when or where it was. I re-read quite a bit to figure it out but overall it didn’t detract too much.
(ARC review via NetGalley)
Penny has been unlucky in love, until she meets Francesco, but a family emergency tears them apart and now Penny suddenly has three men on her plate.
I loved the idea of a woman unlucky in love suddenly having too many interested men in her life. I was hoping for something fun and maybe humorous alongside a down to Earth female lead. Williams is also the author of Our Stop, so, since I read so many good reviews about it, I thought I couldn’t pass this one up. The Love Square has an interesting premise, but I’m not sure the story and the book description are completely in sync.
Penny is a breast cancer survivor, but it’s left her without the ability to bear her children herself. After her most recent relationship failed, she decides it’s time to get a start on having her own family, with or without a man, and her sister is more than willing to help as her surrogate. But then Penny meets the oh so handsome Francesco.
Just about everything about their relationship is perfect, and what isn’t becomes a work in progress they attack together with gusto. Everything is turning up roses for them, even though it means Penny shelves her desire to have a child. But then the unthinkable happens and Penny must leave London for at least a year to help out at her uncle’s restaurant, tearing apart the new couple.
Months later, Penny has successfully revived her uncle’s faltering restaurant, but is lonely. Until an old (male) classmate pops in. It’s just fun, but she enjoys spending time with him. And then is surprised by her attraction to the wine vendor. And then, to complicate her life further, Francesco comes to visit, only to stay and become the new pastry chef at her uncle’s restaurant. Penny thinks she has time to sort things out, to keep having fun, to live her own life the way she wants. But does she really?
The Love Square was really not what I was expecting. I wanted a book where a woman unlucky in love does something magical that suddenly has three men ready to swoon over her and then details some humorous situations she finds herself in as she juggles them. The Love Square is not that story. Actually, I was quite bothered by most of it and then kind of angry at one of the men at the end of it. The way the book ended, though, was it’s saving grace.
I found the beginning to be quite boring. I had no idea where any of it was going. It was sweet, but not much seemed to be happening, and I could not for the life of me figure out where the three men interested in Penny were going to be coming from and how she was going to reach that point. The middle was a muddled mess of a sexually explorative woman who became wrapped up in men and sex. It was little more than romps between the sheets mixed with a light dose of drama. The end felt a little disjointed, as though it had to happen that way in order to get to the ending the author envisioned. But it made me angry and I hated how Penny responded to it as I felt it was almost completely unfounded. On a positive note, the book does end very sweetly and nicely.
The Love Square felt more like a circular kind of story than anything else. I loved Penny at the beginning. As unlucky in love as she seemed to be, she was really succeeding as chef and owner of a cute little cafe in London and was starting her journey into becoming a mother. I loved that she was so willing to take on responsibility and make her life into what she wanted without having to wait for a guy. As a breast cancer survivor, who was still dealing with the effects of it even though they seemingly vanished halfway through the book, she’s strong and determined, but still has a softer, somewhat unsure of herself side. But I was irritated by her in the middle when she just kept falling into bed with all these men and the exhaustion she suffered from as a cancer survivor was pushed way out of the book. I suppose she seemed a little lost and upset about having to rearrange her life due to family responsibilities and duties, but it was a little annoying and made the whole middle seem really slow and sex-filled.
Overall: A Bit Lackluster
I’m just disappointed this was not what I expected based on the book description. Overall, I found it was a bit lackluster and I couldn’t wait for it to hurry up and wrap up. It went from boring to a muddled mess to an end that barely made me feel better about reading it. Not that it was all bad. Penny did have a couple of wonderful friends who made reading it feel worthwhile, and I did like that she was challenged at the end to figure out what she wanted. Overall, though, it felt less like a love square and more about a woman who didn’t want to face, and have to deal with, reality. It was nice, though, that all the missteps she took throughout the story forced her to figure out what to do with her life and what her truth was.
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper 360 for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.
Not An Actual Love Square, But A Solid Romance. I’m a math oriented dude. The imprecision of “love triangle” has always bothered me. For those, assuming both sexes are involved, you need two bi people and a straight person, at minimum. (There *are* possible variations, but a true love triangle would have Person A in love with Person B and Person C – *and* Person B and Person C in love with both Person A *and each other*.) “Love Triangles”, in the common parlance, are actually Love *Angles*, such that two points are connected at a common third point. Similarly, for this Love Square to work, it would really need 2 couples such that each couple is in love with each other *as well as* exactly one person in the other couple. Here, we get two side by side Love Angles such that *three* points are connected at a common *fourth* point.
Math technicalities and English imprecision aside, however, this was actually a solid romance tale of finding oneself and what one really wants that put an interesting spin on the colloquial “Love Triangle” by introducing a *third* man that the common woman falls in love with. And in some fairly direct ways, it actually parallels a lot of what Padma Lakshmi said about her own “love triangle” in her memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate. You’ve got the guy that our female lead – Penny – has an instant connection with. Then you’ve got the guy that actively pursues her and they wind up together almost via fluke. Then you’ve got the guy Penny is introduced to and has a fun time with, but who isn’t interested in long term or commitment generally. And along the way, Penny gets thrust into situations she doesn’t always have complete control of, all while still trying to discover herself after having survived cancer at a fairly early age – mid 20s. The characters are all solid and interesting, and each of the guys makes very strong points about love and what matters. In the end, if you like romance novels at all, you’re probably going to enjoy this one. And if you don’t, give this one a chance – at least it has a few more-interesting-than-normal wrinkles. 🙂 Very much recommended.
The Love Square by Laura Jane Williams a five-star read that will entangle you. This one had me all of a twist, I liked Penny then I didn’t then I did and didn’t and on and on it went, until I really liked her, her struggle and past made her a real character and in the end I got why she behaved the way she did and it made me like her even more, to face one life challenge is difficult, but to then have to uproot life again just as you are finally getting back to your normal, well it would drive any of us a little crazy. I loved that this was a Love square and not a love triangle, it just added to the drama and the humour in some ways, I adored Our Stop so I had high hopes for this one and I am so glad that Laura Jane Williams didn’t disappoint, she kept up with the amazing writing and creates a wonderful story once again.
Thank you so much NetGalley for an advance copy of The Love Square in exchange for my honest opinion.
While reading The Love Square there were moments that I truly enjoyed. I loved Penny’s relationship with her sister. I love her desire to be independent. I felt like Penny had the tools to be a strong character.
What I didn’t love was how Penny was a bit hypocritical at time. It was okay for her to date more than one person but the guy she was dating couldn’t without her being upset over it. I also felt like I was let to believe Penny was going to be happy on her own but was then given a different ending.
This book had potential but just feel flat for me.
Same great writing style and interesting characters but somehow the overall story wasn’t exactly what I thought I’ll get.
It was interesting to see how much love plays a part in this book and how much people are willing to forgive and get over to make something out of their own life.
Although it’s not one of my favourites, it will be a loved book.
Penny Bridge hasn’t been lucky in love. After a cancer diagnosis in her early 20’s her long term boyfriend split, ever since then she’s been focusing on her career and running her very popular cafe. When there’s a fill-in for her usual bread delivery, she feels her luck changing, but maybe it’s a bit too much.
The Love Square had so much more depth than I was expecting, while it does have funny moments, I wouldn’t call it a rom-com. The way the tough issues were handled was well done, from the lingering side effects of cancer and treatment to infertility, it made my heart ache a little. I loved Penny’s strength and courage, and her relationship with her family. Her love interests are very different from each other and I really liked what they each brought to the story. I really really enjoyed this book, while it’s not as light as the synopsis suggests, it’s not super heavy and dark either. It’s sweet, with good characters, and at its core is really about not letting your life circumstances control the outcome, it’s about taking charge and making your own happiness. ARC received in exchange for an honest review.