Plot:

As the clock strikes midnight over a disastrous New Year’s Eve and happy couples celebrate all around her, Kate makes a resolution, hastily scrawled on the back of a napkin, that next New Year’s Eve she will have found someone of her own to kiss.

But when you’re a forty-something cat-mom who’d rather binge Netflix than brave the singles scene, finding someone to kiss turns out to be harder than it sounds. Kate is totally unprepared for navigating hook-up apps, speed-dating, and sliding into somebody’s DMs.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, Kate seems further than ever from reaching her goal. As relationships crumble around her and dark long-kept secrets spill out, could Kate’s fixation on her quest cause her to let true love slip through her fingers forever?

Review:

A lovely, sweet story.
This novel focuses on Kate, a single woman in her forties. On NYE, she pledges to find ‘someone to kiss’ by next NYE.

“You’re one of those sad women who would do anything for a guy. A woman who doesn’t have any opinions of her own. You want men to like you so much that you turn yourself into an extension of them”

This quote sums up the main character.
We go through her current goal of finding someone to kiss with some flashbacks of failed relationships where she usually got so needy. Cuts off everyone and is not surprising when they break up with her one way or another.

Her best friend Julie points out how threatened Kate is by her because Kate is so full of negativity towards her best friend as Julie has what she wants in life. All because Julie is actually nice to everyone (instead of pretending to be a good person), Kate misinterprets this due to her low self-esteem issues and thinks she’s flirting with one of the few guys she kind of likes although Kate made zero effort to show she is into whichever guy it is.
Another thing that annoyed me about Kate and her low self-esteem and jealousy is that when it comes to Julie’s brother Ben. How can she not see that she’s into him? She gets jealous once again that he doesn’t message her as much anymore and so forth. Perhaps take the hint and see he was into you. And the feelings you have obviously mean you have feelings of some sort for him too.

I wish the novel got to the point like others however at the same time I did enjoy exploring the online dating scene from all of the different points of views we got to meet along the way, and it was hilarious the different types of weirdos out there ones you wouldn’t have put together or ones you were expecting.

From speed dating, real life, blind, to online dating it was a great mixture.
It was very enjoyable to read about. The characters were very developed I must say and it was written in a way that kept me reading which are the main things for me to read.

I really enjoyed reading about not only the dating aspect but the friendship aspect. Just because one person has more success naturally does not mean you have to have so much hatred inside you towards that person due to your own feelings about yourself. Be happy for the person and their success instead of being so immaturely jealous of them! Anyone can see how jealous Kate is and how unreasonable she is. Just makes her out to look pathetic that she cannot be her own person picking on Julie who everyone can see did nothing wrong at all as it is all of Kate’s actions. How does Kate not see her actions are showing everyone she’s being childish? You wouldn’t think these characters are in their mid-forties based on how they act and everything which again, was another aspect I loved in this read.

This novel covers many aspects from a few points of view overall I really did enjoy this.
Thanks to the publishers for sending me this novel in exchange for my honest review.

4/5 Stars