Style aside, it was well-paced and, if I’d liked the characters, I could see myself liking the relationship (despite not being a massive fan of the age gap).Over the past few years, TikTok has become an excellent place for finding book recommendations. Like I said, it’s personal, and there really wasn’t much else to the book that made me think it was bad. So really, this entire review comes back to that. Everything I didn’t like about this book comes back to the writing style. I didn’t care for the writing, so I didn’t care for the characters, so I didn’t care for the relationship. All that tense switch did was throw me out of the story.Īs I said, writing style preferences are personal, but I think here what happened is that dislike of writing proliferated down to every other aspect of the book. I get that the parts in present tense were supposed to be like… true whatever, whenever, kind of lines, but they’d have read just as well in past tense. Not only that, the book didn’t seem able to find a tense it wanted to stay in.

And that was clearest in the conversations characters had. To me-and I stress to me because I think attitude to writing style is one of the most personal things when reviewing a book-it felt stilted and forced. Probably the biggest sticking point for me was the writing. This isn’t a bad book! For another person, perhaps none of it would have mattered and they’d have enjoyed it a lot more. I don’t know what it was about it, but I started skimming within a few chapters of the start, and I simply couldn’t bring myself to care one bit about the characters. It sounds harsh but Meet Me in Madrid has to be one of the most boring books I’ve read recently. But when Adrianna plots her next career move just as Charlotte finally opens a door in academia, distance may not be the only thing that keeps them apart. One night becomes three and three nights become a hot and adventurous long-distance relationship when Charlotte returns to the States. Hospitable, too, as she absolutely insists Charlotte spend the night on her pullout sofa as the storm rages on. Impressive as hell and strikingly beautiful.

When a blizzard strands Charlotte in Spain for a few extra days and she’s left with glorious free time on her hands, the only question is: Dare she invite her grad school crush for an after-dinner drink on a snowy night?Īccomplished, take-no-prisoners art historian Adrianna Coates has built an enviable career since Charlotte saw her last. Yet once in a while, maybe every third trip or so, the job goes delightfully sideways… On the other, her plan to become a professor is veering dangerously off track. On the one hand, it takes her around the world. Charlotte Hilaire has a love-hate relationship with her work as a museum courier.

Meet me in madrid by verity lowell