Review: The Last Word

The Last Word by Katy Birchall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Harper Jenkins loves her job as Celebrity Editor for a magazine called Narrative working with her two best friends, even though the Editor-in-Chief Cosmo is a bit of a hater. The only fly in the ointment is that Ryan Jansson is on the features team for the magazine's sister newspaper The Correspondence. The two of them have history, dating back to when they were both newspaper interns eleven years ago, and are enemies. When Ryan joined the newspaper they made an unspoken pact to pretend they didn't know each other.

Then Harper's friend Rakhee the Features Editor accepts a new job and Cosmo promotes Ryan to Features Editor in her place, now Harper has to sit next to neta-freak Ryan and his condescending attitude every day. Despite being the best in the business, someone who relates to celebrities on a personal level and gets them to share fascinating facts about their lives, Cosmo continually tries to undermine Harper, promoting boring businessmen for the front cover rather than world-famous celebrities, and giving her interviews to Ryan for spurious reasons.

This enemies-to-love, second-chance, opposites-attract, romance started off well, gradually revealing the history between Ryan and Harper but for me it gradually went off the boil. I think it was that Ryan didn't really feel like a rounded character, more just a foil to contrast with Harper. Also, it felt a bit lazy to have such a mirroring of events from the past with the present (and something I've read before), it would have worked better for me if maybe the power dynamic had reversed (trying hard not to be spoilery).

Overall, pleasant enough but didn't end as well as it started (for me) and not as good as The Secret Bridesmaid.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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