Review: In Love with Lewis Prescott

In Love with Lewis Prescott by Sarah Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Harper Ellorza is a high-flying architect in San Francisco. She has decided to completely renovate her grandparents' home in Half Moon Bay and achieve all the things with it that they wanted but couldn't afford. She has resigned her job and plans to spend a year overseeing the renovations, but after her plans were slightly delayed by a family illness she arrives to find that the contractor has completely messed up her careful plans (painted the walls the wrong colour, laid the floor the wrong direction, fitted the kitchen doors badly, etc). Now, I let this go for artistic licence, but who pays their contractor for work without seeing what it looks like? Also, apparently this means that she will lose all her savings and won't be able to afford the reno, despite the fact that she is letting family stay rent-free in her apartment in Nob Hill, and that she is taking a year off work unpaid. It seems to me that she was the architect of her own problems, but hey artistic licence.

Feeling deeply unhappy about the contractor fiasco, Harper accidentally runs into a man outside a coffee shop who turns out to be TV hunk Lewis Prescott who has recently been fired from his show, dumped by his model girlfriend, and shouted obscenities at the paparazzi. Lewis is hiding out in a local grotty motel for a few months until the fuss dies down. When Harper tells him her woes he offers to renovate the house for free, if he can stay at the house while he's working.

Anyway, as they work side by side renovating the house they feel the attraction but at first try to resist because - awks - but eventually they can resist no longer. But what chance is there of this romance surviving the reno?

This had so much potential, but it got bogged down in not very much plot, trying on wedding dresses etc, and it seemed as though there was a nothing plot scene, followed by a sex scene, followed by a nothing plot scene over and over again. So, at this point I was thinking three stars, maybe three and a half depending on the ending. Then the author basically stole the ending of Notting Hill as the big finale, just set in San Francisco - I know that film practically off-by-heart, as I suspect do many other people and it was such an obvious lift that I knocked another star off.

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review,

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