Claire Quinn wakes up one morning with her life seemingly headed in the right direction. Her boyfriend is about to move into the new apartment she just rented. She’s taking steps to get her career out of low gear by asking one of the ad executives at the agency where she works to be her mentor. She has good friends, a new wardrobe, and everything seems to be looking up.

That’s until the phone call that wakes her up that fateful morning. It’s a radio talk show calling to inform her that she’s won a terrific Valentine’s Day prize. Except when they also call her boyfriend on the air to inform him they’ve won, they ask him to name the woman he loves. His answer: “My wife, Lindi.”

Suddenly Claire has no boyfriend, an apartment she can no longer afford, and a mentor who makes it clear he’d like their relationship to be more pleasure than business. It’s a good thing she has her close girlfriends, the Chickateers. The four women get together once a week to play games and share their love lives. Then there’s Trip Osborn, the street musician she meets outside her building. The easygoing guitarist isn’t ambitious and lives a rolling-stone lifestyle, clearly not the kind of guy who would fit in with Claire’s “perfect life.” But he’s also nice and supportive, always there for her without question, until the question Claire starts to ask is just how much she wants that “perfect life.”

Dawn Atkins writes with a light and breezy style that keeps her story engaging, even if her characters don’t have quite the appeal. It’s an easy read, with only a few moments of forced humor, that’s mostly sweet and charming. Claire and Trip are likable people and decent company for a few hours. Claire’s trials and tribulations are humorous instead of painful. The story moves quickly through her experiences at work and in the dating pool. There are some quirky characters and nice humorous touches. The whole story has a nicely contemporary feel that I really liked and felt more grounded in today than even some of the other Flipsides.

At the same time, the main characters never really grabbed me enough to really keep me engrossed in their lives. Trip is appealing in a laidback kind of way. If I was being perfectly honest, I envied his free and footloose lifestyle: playing guitar, studying whatever he wanted to about life and the world, and traveling the country. It’s much more interesting than Claire’s more standard-issue “perfect” life, and refreshingly different for a romance. But he’s also the one who’s too perfect. He’s so sweet and so kind and so supportive that he’s fairly one-note, more fantasy than a believable person. This became particularly clear in some of the scenes from his perspective, which didn’t come across as believably male. It’s not until the later stages of the book that he develops some sparks of personality of his own in order to spur some conflict with Claire.

Claire is similarly underdeveloped. She’s sympathetic and thankfully not stupid. But she’s also weak at times. There are moments where she goes with the flow when it would be nice if she’d stick up for herself and be less passive. Some of the nicer moments are when Trip helps her find her voice. The scenes where Claire comes into her own and finds success at her job are very satisfying, and Trip plays a key role in those moments. Toward the end of the book, the romance becomes more interesting and builds to a very sweet finale.

A Perfect Life? is a nice and low-key read. Considering how most of the Flipsides published so far have induced migraines because of forced humor, Atkins’s approach was a welcome one. For those burnt out on Chick Lit/Romance hybrids that are more excruciating than entertaining, this offers a nice change of pace. It’s one of those books where I liked the characters and enjoyed spending time with them, but found it too easy to put the book down to actually recommend it.