I received this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Bad Bachelor by Stefanie London Series: Bad Bachelors #1
Series Rating:
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on March 6th 2018
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
Source: the author
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Everybody’s talking about the hot new app reviewing New York’s most eligible bachelors. But why focus on prince charming when you can read the latest dirt on the lowest-ranked “Bad Bachelors”—NYC’s most notorious bad boys.
If one more person mentions Bad Bachelors to Reed McMahon, someone’s gonna get hurt. A PR whiz, Reed is known as an ‘image fixer’ but his womanizing ways have caught up with him. What he needs is a PR miracle of his own.
When Reed strolls into Darcy Greer’s workplace offering to help save the struggling library, she isn’t buying it. The prickly Brooklynite knows Reed is exactly the kind of guy she should avoid. But the library does need his help. As she reluctantly works with Reed, she realizes there’s more to a man than his reputation. Maybe, just maybe, Bad Bachelor #1 is THE one for her.
This is easily my favorite Stefanie London book, and that’s saying a lot because I generally really like her books.
A new app called Bad Bachelors has just launched in New York. It’s described as similar to Yelp, but for men. Basically, women can add single men to the app and rate them as dates. Reed McMahon is a PR executive who’s in the middle of his own PR nightmare. Bad Bachelors has painted him as the biggest asshole in New York and he has no idea how to fight back. The app is run by an anonymous woman, and the women who comment are also anonymous, so even though he can figure out who some of them are through context clues, he has no way to defend himself.
Stefanie London did a great job showing the problems inherent in an app like this. Even though the accounts of dates are anonymous, the creator (whose identity we do eventually discover), knows some of them are made up, but she doesn’t do anything to stop it or take the stories down. The sheer number of them alone should have been a clue. Reed does have an actual job, and there were hundreds of these accounts of him being a dick to women, sleeping with them then never calling, making promises he then broke. When would he possibly have time for all of that dating??
And that’s the other issue with this app. By all accounts, Reed is up front with the women he dates. He’s not looking for anything beyond a fling and a little fun, and he tells them that. Their stories of him being a jerk strike me more as sour grapes than anything else. I do wish we’d heard of a single account of a woman who had said: “Reed promised me one night of great sex, and that’s what I got; it was wonderful”. But every single one that we saw was dragging him for not sticking around.
Darcy isn’t thrilled to end up having to work with Reed to plan a much-needed library fundraiser. She’s never actually met him, but she’s read all of the reviews of him on the Bad Bachelor app and she is not impressed. I didn’t like this aspect of Darcy. I realize that I spend more time on the internet than most people, but in this day of “fake news” and actual fake news and constant trolling, I really wish she had taken these reviews with a grain of salt, especially as she got to know Reed better. Like I said earlier, there are hundreds of reviews. It’s not even possible for him to have dated all of these women, and eat, sleep, and work. I wish Darcy had given that some more thought.
But when these two get together, Reed and Darcy were so much fun to watch. The attraction is instant, but Darcy is reluctant to get involved with Reed. Even if all the accounts are exaggerated, he definitely isn’t interested in settling down, and Darcy doesn’t want a one night stand. No matter how attracted she is to Reed, and believe me, she’s very attracted to Reed, she’s not willing to give up on what she wants from a relationship. Reed was confident in his day-to-day life, never making a misstep, but there were times, mainly when he was dealing with his dad, that you could see glimpses of the hurt little boy he had been when his mother left. Darcy can see these glimpses as well, and they go a long way toward making her think they could have more than just a fling, but not quite far enough toward making her realize that a lot of those reviews on the app were bullshit.
Reed is equally interested in Darcy, but he has no faith in anyone’s ability to stick around, and he doesn’t think Darcy will be any different. He’s not going to let people just continue to walk away from him, so he indulges in one-night stands and short-term relationships. And he knows that Darcy wouldn’t be just a one-night stand, so he puts up at least a token resistance to the thought of getting together with her.
I loved this. I love watching two people pretend they can’t stand each other while fighting their attraction to each other. I love watching their defenses crumble and them still put up a fight. It’s so much fun when they actually fall. I thought Reed could have groveled a little bit more, though. He was terrible to Darcy when they broke up.
There was fun, snarky, sexy banter, Thursday panties on a Monday, and so much heat between these two. And even though I was frustrated with Darcy’s initial inability or refusal to see Reed as more than the sexist pig he was portrayed to be, I thought it was a clever way for Stefanie London to comment on the way we use social media and our tendency to believe what we read even with evidence to the contrary staring us in the face. If you haven’t picked this one up yet, you really should. And be prepared to get through it one sitting, because you’re not going to want to put it down once you start.
About Stefanie London
Growing up, Stefanie came from a family of women who loved to read. Her favourite activity was going shopping with her Nan during school holidays, where she would sit on the floor of the bookstore with her little sister and painstakingly select the books to spend her allowance on. Thankfully, Nan was a patient woman.
Thus, it was no surprise Stefanie was the sort of student who would read her English books before the semester started. After sneaking several literature subjects into her ‘very practical’ Business degree, she got a job in Communications. When writing emails and newsletters didn’t fulfil her creative urges, she turned to fiction and was finally able to write the stories that kept her mind busy at night.
Now she lives with her very own hero and dreams of travelling the world. She frequently indulges in her passions for good coffee, French perfume, high heels and zombie movies. Recently she gave up her day job to write sexy, contemporary romance stories and she couldn’t be happier.
