Review: Here's Looking At You

Here's Looking At You by Mhairi McFarlane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aureliana (Anna) Alessi is a history lecturer at UCL and a specialist in the Byzantine period, particularly the Empress Theodora. She might be single but she's loving life, she has great friends and a job she loves. She's trying internet dating but so far everyone she's paired with has been a disaster. When she's invited to a school reunion she can't think of anything more excruciating than mingling with the people who bullied and humiliated overweight Anna as a child, but her friends persuade her it would be a big eff-you to show up looking a million dollars. Despite losing all the weight, the braces and learning how to tame her wild hair, Anna still feels like that Billy-no-mates little Italian girl who was mocked and bullied at school.

When she gets to the reunion no-one recognises Anna or even speaks to her, until her secret crush, nemesis, and the architect of her most humiliating moment, James Fraser, turns up looking just as gorgeous as ever with his evil side-kick Laurence. Laurence might be sixteen years older but he still has a teenage boy's mentality when it comes to women (lots of phwoar get a load of that kind of comments) and he tries, unsuccessfully, to chat up Anna.

James works for an aching hip and trendy digital company, starting to feel his age he wishes his colleagues would turn the volume down on their incessant music, stop gabbing about their antics the previous night and buckle down to do some work, not a very popular opinion. His wife has left him after just a year of marriage, because she feels stifled, leaving him with the house she chose and furnished, together with a grumpy pedigree cat. James has always been the smug married guy at work with a screensaver montage of pictures of him and his wife Eva, he can't bear to tell everyone they've split up. James' firm has been engaged to do the digital marketing and communications for an exhibition at the British Museum on the Empress Theodora that Anna has helped to curate. It's their second meeting and James still hasn't made the connection between Anna Alessi and the girl he humiliated at school.

As someone else says, this book hits the cliché button hard, there's a nagging Italian mother, a bridezilla little sister, a grumpy cat, secret identities, enemies to lovers, fake relationships, and dreadful first dates. Yet I loved it, I just liked James and Anna.

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