The Rom-Com Agenda by Jayne Denker

Narrated by Erika Schindele

Standalone. Clean Romance.

I requested The Rom-Com Agenda by Jayne Denker from NetGalley just for the title and cover. RomComs are my favorite trope both in books and movies, so this sounded perfect. It started out really strong but sadly didn’t stay that way.

Leah was great, I loved her character. She came back to town to help her foster mom while she was dying. Being a foster kid made her have trouble making friends and having roots, so after her foster mom dies, she works every odd job she could find to make enough money to leave town and move on.

While doing one of these odd jobs, Leah overhears Eli getting dumped by his girlfriend. He proposed after only a few short months, because she was leaving for Europe. He wants to win her back, so his sister and her friends are helping by giving him a complete makeover. But everywhere they go, Leah is working there and she end up getting roped into the makeover.

One of the ways they are trying to help him is by making him watch a ton of rom-com movies so he can learn from them, only Leah is the only one with a VCR. Leah clearly liked him yet all he did was pine away for his ex in Europe. I mean he was obsessed with his ex for the majority of the book! Leah deserved so much better.

Likes:

I liked Leah so much, and I loved her foster back story.
Her found family in Eli’s family.
I liked the old 80s/90s movie references.

Dislikes:

He pined away for his ex almost the whole book!
A few subplots were started and kind of left hanging.
It was very long for the story told at 11 hours.
Eli was a total wimpy guy with a nothing personality.
Single narrator/3rd person.

The Narration:

Erika Schindele was new to me and did a great job with the material. It was just a very strong 3rd person (if that makes sense? Sometimes you really notice, sometimes you don’t) and I felt like a male voice doing his sections would have helped.

The Down & Dirty:

The Rom-Com Agenda was an OK read for me. I put it down once and listened to another and came back to it hoping it was my mood, but it wasn’t. I wanted to punch Eli in the face and knock some sense into him for pining away for his ex and not seeing what’s in front of him, and I was mad at Leah for putting up with him. Though I can’t say I really didn’t like the book at all, I still wouldn’t recommend it.