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There’s a saying that goes ‘here for a good time, not for a long time’, which perfectly describes the short (200 pages in e-book form) friends-to-lovers Finding Mr. Right Next Door.
Lexi Dean and Matt Freeman are renowned amongst the Station 1 fireteam of Dry Rock, CO for their “twenty-five-year-old-marriage”. They grew up together, work together, live “on adjacent lots”, and have a dog (I was pleasantly surprised Ballance ignored the make-a-man-hotter-by-giving-him-a-tiny-dog-to-cuddle-in-his-huge-arms trope and made it a mastiff). But after two decades, it looks like irreconcilable differences might end this pseudo-marriage. Lexi wants a “perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect dog. And a white picket fence” and Matt is “pursuing anything with a pulse”. Then Lexi joins a dating website and sets her kitchen on fire (not because of the dating website), which results in her living with Matt while attempting to date. Matt is displeased at the intrusion of another rooster into his hen house, and pretty soon is laying claim to Lexi.
Finding Mr. Right Next Door is a great in-the-moment read, especially after the first twenty five percent, when it pulls a pop concert quick change and goes from a steady, Plain Jane romance to a romp. The writing is a hoot; clever, full of wordplay, and sexily observant. Lexi at one point finds Matt cooking shirtless and thinks “she was staring down a man who knew how to do sex better than any other in existence, and now his washboard abs were flavored with bacon”. Ballance makes the sex and foreplay itself feel original without diving into a war chest of I’ve-never-heard-of-that sex. She’s like an engineer making something cool out of two toilet paper rolls, some duct tape, and a cardboard box, except she’s an author with a man, a woman, a P and a V.
The downside of this book is that because Matt and Lexi have known each other so long, there’s nothing they don’t know about each other, and so the reader never really gets a chance to learn about either of them. And because their relationship (as friends and as lovers) doesn’t have any particular challenge to work on, there’s no opportunity for their distinctive personalities to be drawn out that way, either. I also had an issue with the lack of boundaries around family. Matt has a grandma who’s a chronic over-sharer about her sex life and the state of her underwear (she’d “checked herself into a retirement facility for the sole purpose of carousing with men”) and Matt literally starts toying with Lexi’s ladyparts under the table at a dinner with her parents. Please, people, I’m all for sexual expression, but not around blood relations.
Finding Mr. Right Next Door is a good choice if you want a book that is high on sex that’s augmented with emotional connection, but you don’t want to actually watch the creation of said emotional connection, and just want to spend your time turning pages with an amused smirk on your face.
Buy it at: Amazon
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Grade: B
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 15/05/20
Publication Date: 05/2020
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Part-time cowgirl, part-time city girl. Always working on converting all my friends into romance readers ("Charlotte, that was the raunchiest thing I have ever read!").
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Oh God, save me from the “feisty Grandma” character! So many books that had the potential to be good (I can think of ones by Ruthie Knox, Melanie Harlow, and J. Kenner right off the bat) are ruined by the notion that it’s hilarious to hear a woman in her eighties talk about hot men and erections. Ugh! Send “sex-talking granny” back to central casting—and she can take “plot muppets” along with her.
I have to laugh. I am almost 60–no grandkids yet, damnit–and my daughter is forever telling me and my husband to tone it down. I suspect I might become that inappropriate grandparent some day!
Let me stress, I have nothing against an older woman being both sex-positive and sexually active, what I’m opposed to is the way in which the “feisty grandma” is presented. It’s like, “Isn’t it funny for some withered old gray-haired eighty-year-old post-menopausal crone to admire the hot guy’s abs and urge her granddaughters to go out and ‘get some’?” Like that’s the whole joke—she’s an old woman and she knows what sex is! Ugh!
As for your kids telling you to “tone it down,” it’s always been my experience that kids never want to acknowledge their parents as having intimate/sex lives—even when said children are the living proof of it.
I grew up in a household that talked about and celebrated the joys of committed sex. My husband and I have replicated that in our home. My daughter complains but I think, ultimately, our kids are grateful to have grown up in a shame free household.
I don’t know of a book example offhand, but I think a movie that handled a sexually active older character really well was “Sheryl” in Poms.Yeah, she’s disappointed when Diane Keaton’s character moves into their retirement community and isn’t a man (“We have a serious shortage of erections around here…”), but there’s more to her than that and she turns out to be a great friend. :)
My least favorite subset of that character type is the “matchmaker grandmas and moms.” But out, ladies, butt out!
Oh I know exactly what you mean… I just read a book with one of those and the book seemed to think she was cute and feisty but I was horrified… I didn’t know that had become a trope by this point, I’ll have to steer well clear of those. (To be clear, it’s not the fact that an older woman talks about sex or enjoys it herself… It’s the fact that she demands details of her granddaughter’s sex life and openly leers at said granddaughter’s partner that is so gross. Imagine if a man did that)
The book was Boss Man Bridegroom by Meghann Quinn. Terrible book, put me in a reading slump.
Edit : oooh i just saw we can edit now! That’s great!
“Imagine if a man did that….” That is exactly what I said about the Ruthie Knox book (sorry, I can’t remember the title right now, but anyone who has read her books will remember the character). There’s a reason there’s no “feisty grandpa who jokes and talks non-stop with his grandkids about sexual matters” in romance novels—and that’s because the character is not amusing, just creepy. And I don’t think that switching genders improves the situation.