Each week Stephanie, Lenore and I will be featuring a Summer of Love review on our blogs. If you missed Stephanie’s post from Monday, check it out at Once Upon a Chapter. If you missed Lenore’s post from Tuesday, check it out at Celebrity Readers.
Happy Thursday y’all! Today is my stop for Summer of Love, and I’m featuring a quirky, enemies-to-lovers romance. Steamy chemistry, witty banter, and a revenge scheme set the story for Sonia Hartl‘s Heartbreak for Hire. Be sure to check out the rest of this week’s posts:
- On Tuesday, Lenore shared some YA contemporary recommendations and her review of Coming Up for Air by Miranda Kenneally.
We’ll be back Monday on Once Upon a Chapter.
I received this book via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of this review.
Heartbreak for Hire by Sonia Hartl Published by Gallery Books on 2021-07-27
Length: 320 pages
Reviewing eARC from Netgalley
Rating:
Reading Challenges: #NGEW2021, 2021 New Release Challenge, 2021 Summer of Love, COYER 2021
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A smart, sexy, and witty romantic comedy—perfect for fans of Christina Lauren and Sally Thorne—about a twentysomething who lives out every woman’s fantasy: getting paid to give men who do us wrong a taste of their own medicine. But when a previous target unexpectedly shows up at her office, she’s forced to rethink her life as a professional heartbreaker.
Brinkley Saunders has a secret.
To everyone in the academic world she left behind, she lost it all when she dropped out of grad school. Once a rising star following in her mother’s footsteps, she’s now an administrative assistant at an insurance agency—or so they think.
In reality, Brinkley works at Heartbreak for Hire, a secret service that specializes in revenge for jilted lovers, frenemies, and long-suffering coworkers with a little cash to spare and a man who needs to be taken down a notch. It might not be as prestigious as academia, but it helps Brinkley save for her dream of opening an art gallery and lets her exorcise a few demons, all while helping to empower women.
But when her boss announces she’s hiring male heartbreakers for the first time, Brinkley’s no longer so sure she’s doing the right thing—especially when her new coworker turns out to be a target she was paid to take down. Though Mark spends his days struggling up the academic ladder, he seems to be the opposite of a backstabbing adjunct: a nerd at heart in criminally sexy sweater vests who’s attentive both in and out of the bedroom. But as Brinkley finds it increasingly more difficult to focus on anything but Mark, she soon realizes that like herself, people aren’t always who they appear to be.
With Sonia Hartl’s “bitingly funny” (Publishers Weekly) prose, Heartbreak for Hire is a clever romcom you and your girlfriends won’t be able to stop talking about.
A hate-to-love romance awaits in Heartbreak for Hire, the newest release from author Sonia Hartl. This rom-com touches on cheaters and revolves around revenge which leads to some hilarious missteps and misguided intentions.
Brinkley is a Heartbreaker, hired by women who have been cheated on, lied to, emotionally torn down, or had their careers jeopardized by egotistical men. It’s Brinkley’s job to embarrass and humiliate these men, sometimes recording their incriminating behavior, basically she tears down their egos. For two years, she’s been happy with her line of revenge work until her latest target turns out to be a genuinely nice guy. She finds herself attracted to him in all the wrong ways, and ultimately fails in her task. Imagine her surprise when her boss announces that they are no longer just a woman’s organization and are hiring men and one of those men was her nice guy.
I really like Mark. He’s not at all what Brinkley expected. He’s an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago, and despite everything Brinkley has experienced in academia, Mark is the opposite of her expectations. Their attraction to one another oozes off the pages, making them easy to root for.
Romances are usually pretty straightforward: meet-cute, some kind of problem keeping them apart, and then an HEA. It’s how the author executes those things that make a book. While I really enjoyed how this process in the book, Mark and Brinkley really are fun, I had a hard time with the company they are working for. The revenge plot felt slimy to me. While I get that it was how the author got them to meet, it made me cringe, even if I’ll admit I did laugh at a few of their assignments.
Overall, I enjoyed Heartbreak for Hire. Brinkley and Mark’s witty banter and their on-page chemistry drove the story. If you are looking for an out-of-the-box, hate-to-love rom-com, I recommend you check this one out.
About Sonia Hartl
Sonia Hartl is the author of The Lost Girls, Not Your #Lovestory, and Have a Little Faith in Me (Page Street), which received a starred review in BookPage and earned nominations for the Georgia Peach Book Award, YALSA's Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, Bank Street College of Education's Best Children's Books of the Year, and ALA's Rise: A Feminist Book Project List. She's also the author of an adult romcom, Heartbreak for Hire (Gallery). When she's not writing or reading, she enjoys playing board games with her family, attempting to keep her garden alive, or looking up craft projects she'll never get around to completing on Pinterest. She's a member of SCBWI and was the Managing Director for Pitch Wars 2020. She lives in Grand Rapids with her husband and two daughters.
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