Michelle Dsouza
Glow Job
Every time I had to put this book down, I was a little annoyed. I wanted to keep going. Three days, a hundred pages at a time, and life kept getting in the way shaking me out the escape that this book was!
Chloe is burnt out. Invisible to her boss, overworked, underappreciated, and I didn't find it sad so much as infuriating, because I've let jobs do this to me more times than I want to admit. She was a mirror, and not always a comfortable one. She books a wellness retreat at a sun-drenched Ibizan villa and gets chaos instead of calm. Feral goats, beach raves, skinny-dipping, wedding-crashing, and Ben, who runs the place, looks like Pedro Pascal, cooks like a dream, and is visibly a bit out of his depth. He's on a sabbatical from his London restaurant, trying to turn his late uncle's rundown villa into something functional. Neither of them planned on the other.
The romance is sweet, but it's not the reason to read this. The women are. Chloe, Jess, and Zara are at completely different stages of their lives, and they still find this deep, easy belonging in each other. That friendship is the warmest thing in the book. It's three women rediscovering themselves and their own bodies, holding space for each other while they do it, and Bailey writes it with a lot of care. It made me want to call my own people. Women need to do this more, reach out to their inner circles, protect the time they spend with the women they actually love being around. Chloe specifically is every woman who overthinks everything, puts her career before herself, runs on imposter syndrome, and never once shoots her shot. Relatable to the point of slight discomfort.
Ben is the heart of it. Bailey writes him as thoughtful, not just handsome, someone who notices the women around him battling new roles and changing bodies and meets them with kindness. But the thing I loved most was the banter between Ben and Miguel. It's warm and silly and feels like an actual friendship, and it quietly carries the weight of the relationship Ben had with his late uncle Lorenzo. I'd read a whole book of those two just talking.
If I had one note, it's the spice. The characters are written with so much thought that the language in the intimate scenes felt a little at odds with the rest, slightly cruder than the care everywhere else would suggest, and the first scene between Chloe and Ben arrived a bit suddenly. To be clear, the spice itself is mild compared to a lot of what I've read. It's more that the wording occasionally didn't match how tenderly these characters were drawn.
The ending is what you'd expect from a rom-com, a little predictable, but it works, and I was relieved it didn't take the cheap dramatic turn it flirted with near the end. There's a message too, spelled out in the author's note: women and mothers deserve love, deserve to feel appreciated, deserve time that's purely their own. Book the holiday. Wear the bikini. Eat what you want. You are important. For all the women out there, give yourself a break. Away from it all. Annually.
Warm, funny, full of heart, and a lot of soul underneath.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
Every time I had to put this book down, I was a little annoyed. I wanted to keep going. Three days, a hundred pages at a time, and life kept getting in the way shaking me out the escape that this book was!
Chloe is burnt out. Invisible to her boss, overworked, underappreciated, and I didn't find it sad so much as infuriating, because I've let jobs do this to me more times than I want to admit. She was a mirror, and not always a comfortable one. She books a wellness retreat at a sun-drenched Ibizan villa and gets chaos instead of calm. Feral goats, beach raves, skinny-dipping, wedding-crashing, and Ben, who runs the place, looks like Pedro Pascal, cooks like a dream, and is visibly a bit out of his depth. He's on a sabbatical from his London restaurant, trying to turn his late uncle's rundown villa into something functional. Neither of them planned on the other.
The romance is sweet, but it's not the reason to read this. The women are. Chloe, Jess, and Zara are at completely different stages of their lives, and they still find this deep, easy belonging in each other. That friendship is the warmest thing in the book. It's three women rediscovering themselves and their own bodies, holding space for each other while they do it, and Bailey writes it with a lot of care. It made me want to call my own people. Women need to do this more, reach out to their inner circles, protect the time they spend with the women they actually love being around. Chloe specifically is every woman who overthinks everything, puts her career before herself, runs on imposter syndrome, and never once shoots her shot. Relatable to the point of slight discomfort.
Ben is the heart of it. Bailey writes him as thoughtful, not just handsome, someone who notices the women around him battling new roles and changing bodies and meets them with kindness. But the thing I loved most was the banter between Ben and Miguel. It's warm and silly and feels like an actual friendship, and it quietly carries the weight of the relationship Ben had with his late uncle Lorenzo. I'd read a whole book of those two just talking.
If I had one note, it's the spice. The characters are written with so much thought that the language in the intimate scenes felt a little at odds with the rest, slightly cruder than the care everywhere else would suggest, and the first scene between Chloe and Ben arrived a bit suddenly. To be clear, the spice itself is mild compared to a lot of what I've read. It's more that the wording occasionally didn't match how tenderly these characters were drawn.
The ending is what you'd expect from a rom-com, a little predictable, but it works, and I was relieved it didn't take the cheap dramatic turn it flirted with near the end. There's a message too, spelled out in the author's note: women and mothers deserve love, deserve to feel appreciated, deserve time that's purely their own. Book the holiday. Wear the bikini. Eat what you want. You are important. For all the women out there, give yourself a break. Away from it all. Annually.
Warm, funny, full of heart, and a lot of soul underneath.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.