Review: A fun and very unpredictable adventure into dating
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 23, 2013
37-year-old Gill is very successful professionally, having started her own recruitment agency, but her work ethic has left her very little time for a love life. Married very young and divorced shortly thereafter, Gill has a string of unsuccessful relationships under her belt. Despite having three great girlfriends, Debbie, Angela and Lisa, Gill wants to fall in love with the right man and so when she sees an advertisement for Happily Ever After, a dating service for professionals, she dives into the world of dating cautiously but optimistically. What follows is an adventure in dating during which Gill learns,sometimes the hard way, how to trust her own instincts to find her own happily ever after.I really enjoyed The Dating Game. Author Susan Buchanan created a very realistic world and having experienced my own dating adventures, I would know. I really liked Gill. She was very believable and easy to relate to. Her reactions to some of the men she met were realistic, hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking. I appreciated that sometimes the man liked her but she wasn't into him and that sometimes she was interested in the man and he didn't want to pursue her because that is real life. I especially enjoyed her response to being the "rejectee" because it was honest. The secondary characters and their relationships with Gill, from her BFFs, to her brother and sister-in-law also added to my enjoyment of this book. My favorite aspect about The Dating Game, however, was not knowing who Gill would end up with. I kept thinking I had it figured out and would quickly realize I was wrong. The reader is kept guessing to the very end and the unpredictable nature of the book kept me turning the pages needing to know who would be "the one." Like real life, things weren't always black and white. Sure, there was the blatant douchebag, but for the most part, there was no obvious good or bad guy and the author could have gone in many different directions, adding to the unpredictability. I must confess that my heart had me hoping for a different ending but at the end of the day, I thoroughly enjoyed The Dating Game and look forward to reading more from Susan Buchanan.