Mr. Nice Guy
by Jennifer Miller & Jason Feifer
Named one of Cosmopolitan's Best Books of 2018
From the husband and wife writing duo Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer comes Mr. Nice Guy, a funny and all too real comedy about the pursuit of success in life--and love--in today's working world.
Lucas Callahan, a man who gave up his law degree, fiancée and small-town future for a shot at making it in the Big Apple. He snags an entry-level job at Empire magazine, believing it’s only a matter of time before he becomes a famous writer. And then late one night in a downtown bar he meets a gorgeous brunette who takes him home...
Carmen Kelly wanted to be a hard-hitting journalist, only to find herself cast in the role of Empire's sex columnist thanks to the boys' club mentality of Manhattan magazines. Her latest piece is about an unfortunate—and unsatisfying—encounter with an awkward and nerdy guy, who was nice enough to look at but horribly inexperienced in bed.
Lucas only discovers that he’s slept with the infamous Carmen Kelly—that is, his own magazine’s sex columnist!—when he reads her printed take-down. Humiliated and furious, he pens a rebuttal and signs it, "Nice Guy." Empire publishes it, and the pair of columns go viral. Readers demand more. So the magazine makes an arrangement: Each week, Carmen and Lucas will sleep together... and write dueling accounts of their sexual exploits.
It’s the most provocative sexual relationship any couple has had, but the columnist-lovers are soon engaging in more than a war of words: They become seduced by the city’s rich and powerful, tempted by fame, and more attracted to each other than they’re willing to admit. In the end, they will have to choose between ambition, love, and the consequences of total honesty.
“The Devil Wears Prada meets Sex and the City—a page-turner that's part sex diary, part coming-of-age story." —Carolyn Kylstra, editor in chief, SELF
“I COULD NOT PUT THIS BOOK DOWN!!! It totally messed up my week, it messed up my deadlines, but I absolutely loved it.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians
Kobo
Momma Says: 2 stars ⭐⭐
Boy meets girl, boy goes home with girl, girl happens to be a sex columnist and writes a scathing article about boy, boy responds with an equally scathing letter to the magazine. Uh-oh, they both work for the same magazine. It's not hard to see where this story is going, and it does - in a slow crawl.
Mr Nice Guy is well-written, at least in the technical sense, which is the only reason for my second star on the rating. However, technical correctness aside, this one does not live up to the hype that caught my attention and made me want to read it. Compared to The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City, a funny and all too real comedy, the ultimate RomCom. Those are just a few of things I saw about this one before reading. I found none of that.
Now, maybe it's just my sense of humor, but at just over the 50% mark, I realized that I hadn't laughed even once at this supposedly funny story. Not a chuckle, not even a smile, nada. And on top of that, I was bored. I didn't like the characters, most especially our main characters, Lucas and Carmen. They are both self-absorbed, judgy, and don't seem to care who might get hurt as they climb that invisible ladder to success. Carmen may as well be a prostitute charging by the hour with the way she uses sex to get what she wants, and Lucas, well, Lucas acts like a teenager having a tantrum most of the time. I suppose, when looking at it that way, these two are well-suited. I don't know how they even liked themselves, let alone anyone else.
The pacing is slow, and the story is filled with way too much non-essential information. Setting the scene is important, and the reader does need to know about the jobs these people do as well as who they are and how they live their lives, but this one went a bit over the top with that. So, at around the 50% mark and 27 chapters in, I decided enough was enough. I didn't care enough about any of the characters to want to know how their story played out, and the book was just too easy to set aside and too hard to pick back up. Life is too short for that.
❃❃ARC provided by NetGalley and St. Martin's Press
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