Book Review: Swipe Right

One of my recent reads was a book that I enjoyed reading…I seem to enjoy reading about couples who seem to get the love right, but the timing so wrong because this is another one of them. Swipe Right by Stephie Chapman is about Fran and Ollie, new recruits at a media content agency who start off clashing with each other to work friends.

Credit: Hera

The story revolves not just on the friendship and the wrong timing romance (they met when she had a boyfriend, and Ollie was seeing someone else), but on Fran’s project for work as a result of her recent breakup: dating and evaluating men that she meets from an online dating app. 

That whole date evaluation was a bad idea from the start. Interesting yes, but was trouble waiting to happen. Of course, Fran’s dates later find out that they are part of the anonymous date evaluation that she is writing about and things end up badly for her. I think anyone could tell her that doing this when the people you write about are ones who you hardly know, there is the danger that they will react in the ways that you do not expect. The guys she dated were such characters! It makes you wonder what kind of people are on these apps! If there is any lesson I learned from this part of the story, is that you need to be careful and discerning about dating someone from those online dating apps. I am glad that I gave up on that a long time ago!

Fran and Ollie’s story and how things developed and progressed between them unfolded in a way that gave readers time to see how this made sense even though they were drawing a line because of their respective relationships. The spark, the chemistry between the characters was definitely there for me, no matter how other readers think otherwise. 

I also enjoyed the supporting characters in this one. Some books have supporting characters that were just background and fillers for the story but I thought that the group of people they had in this one enhanced the whole thing instead of just fading away when they were not necessary.

My only complaint about stories like this (not just for this book) is that it is always justified that the leads fell for someone else because their respective significant others are the “villains” of the story. It just feels too convenient. I think it would be realistic to just show that people can sometimes outgrow each other or that – surprise – the lead character is the bad guy or girl in this for falling for someone else while in a relationship. 

While I did love how Fran and Ollie were together, and I loved that part where the book talked about the photo of the two where they just had this spark with each other. I wish I could see that photo, it sounded like such a great one that I could practically picture it in my mind!

I was happy that the lead characters had their happily ever after in the end, but I was a bit conflicted with how it was handled. I think that Ollie messed up so much, and he did not fight for what he had with Fran enough and broke her heart more than once. I think that Fran should have made it a little more difficult for him before they got back together. I think that the writer should have done more to redeem Ollie in the eyes of the reader to make him worthy of Fran after everything that happened.

Swipe Right is a good read for me, romance novel readers and chick-lit readers would probably enjoy this too.