Blurb: If there’s one thing worse than being fired from the grottiest restaurant in town, it’s coming home early to find your boyfriend in bed with someone else.
Reeling from the indignity of a double dumping on the same day, Georgina snatches at the next job that she’s offered – barmaid in a newly opened pub, which just so happens to run by the boy she fell in love with at school: Lucas McCarthy. And whereas Georgina (voted Most Likely to Succeed in her school yearbook) has done nothing but dead-end jobs in the last twelve years, Lucas has not only grown into a broodingly handsome man, but also has turned into an actual grown-up with a business and a dog along the way.
Meeting Lucas again not only throws Georgina’s rackety present into sharp relief, but also brings a dark secret from her past bubbling to the surface. Only she knows the truth about what happened on the last day of school, and why she’s allowed it to chase her all these years…
Review: I requested to review this book a while back but I was a little hesitant to actually start reading it. A couple times now I've been fooled by these cute cartoonish covers into thinking that I'm going to read something adorable but hot and romantic, only to discover that it reads more like a book written by an author who is afraid to write sex scenes. (Please note that I've only read a handful of cartoon covers, so this is by no means a hard and fast rule). My friend refers to them as romance for people who don't like romance.
But two pages into Don't You Forget About Me and I was so fucking sold.
McFarlane's voice (aka. Georgina's voice) is sarcastic, witty, and relatable. I was laughing out loud and nodding my head in agreement, saying to myself, "Wow. This isn't at all what I expected." The best part was that Georgina wasn't even close to perfect. In the beginning I was thinking that she wasn't even someone I'd really want to be friends with, but as the book progressed and I got to know her more and more, including the little snippets of the secrets she'd harboring, I couldn't believe how much I had grown to love her.
And Lucas, our grumpy hero, wasn't too easy to like from the beginning either. But it's crazy how much character development McFarlane managed to sneak in between all the laughs. He's the perfect hero for those many, many people who like their men full of frowns and sarcasm. I was desperate to know what had turned our lovesick Lucas into a growling asshole.
Georgina and Lucas loved each other once, twelve years ago, and though McFarlane doesn't let us in on what went wrong right away, we know that their relationship imploded. The entire book I was foaming at the mouth to know more about their relationship and McFarlane tortured me by only releasing tiny bits of information here and there. But let me tell you the pay off was worth it.
Don't You Forget About Me is a book for the current climate.
This novel wasn't raunchy or dirty or stomach-clenchingly sexy. It was a romance novel, a dedication, a been-there story for all women who've been afraid to say no, who've blamed themselves for a man's actions, who've never told anyone what happened to them because they're afraid. It was sweet & beautiful & romantic in delicious ways and it made me feel proud to be a woman. I want my future daughter to read this book & know she can use that R word. She can give it a name if she has to. She never has to be ashamed to say no.
The sexual chemistry is there. Does it leap off the page? Not particularly. But this book is about more than sex. It's about the relationship between two people coming to terms with the things that pulled them apart. It's an empowering tale.
You can pre-order it here.