Abandoned by Booklikes

I feel bad for saying this, but this is one of my least favorite books by McFarlane. I think the biggest problem I have is that the heroine (Rachel) is hoping for emotional cheating or something to happen with the hero (Ben) who we go into knowing is married. I just didn't like her and thought Ben read her very well at the end. She was and still is a mess. I think the Happily Ever After (HEA) we get was 100 percent not earned. I did like the secondary characters in this one, especially Rachel's best friend Caroline. Other than that, eh.

"You Had Me at Hello" follows crime journalist Rachel. Rachel is engaged to her long-time partner, but starts to have doubts and then breaks up with him. When Rachel hears from her friend Caroline that their university friend Ben is around again, Rachel purposely makes sure she bumps into him. We don't know what happened between them, but it quickly becomes apparent that Rachel is caring a "torch" for Ben. McFarlane follows Rachel and Ben in the present and then flashbacks to them back in university. Rachel wishes for Ben after all of these years, too bad he appears to be happily married though Rachel starts to wonder about that.

Yeah....there's no cheating romance fans, but for me I think it was much worse. Reading about how Rachel tries her best to manipulate Ben and others around her was a lot. There's a secondary story-line about a dishonest coworker of Rachel's and I maybe laughed out loud at that point. I wish that we had Rachel realizing what she was doing was out of bounds. I wish that McFarlane had ended the book with Rachel being on a journey of growth and meeting someone new. I think if the genders had been switched up and we had Ben doing this mess to Rachel we would have called him a stalker and all kinds of things. I think the closest character that got to the issues I had with things was Caroline. 

The writing felt stilted in this one. I think it's because of the jumping back and forth. Also I did not get the great connection between Rachel and Ben. The flow was up and down too. I was just pleased to get to the end and annoyed at the whole book.