Narrated by January LaVoy

It’s my fault. I should have known that the premise of Not the Girl You Marry was not going to work that well for me. I guess I was hoping that the blurb was not entirely accurate or that this was going to be one of those times when something I thought could not work actually did. But still. My bad.

The book is well written, there are plenty
of things to like but in the end I could not get over the insurmountable hurdle
of the male lead’s behaviour. I found myself increasingly disappointed by him
and less than three hours before the end of the book I pulled the pin. I just
couldn’t do it. Because I know this book ends in a HEA and I didn’t believe
Jack deserved one. At least, not with Hannah. So my decision not to finish was
more about that than anything else.

This is one of those books where if the
premise works for the listener it will be a raging success.

Here is the blurb:

“How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days gets a
millennial makeover in this romantic comedy by USA Today bestselling author
Andie J. Christopher.

Jack Nolan is a gentleman, a journalist, and
unlucky in love. His viral success has pigeon-holed him as the how-to guy for a
buzzy, internet media company instead of covering hard-hitting politics. Fed up
with his fluffy articles and the app-based dating scene as well, he strikes a
deal with his boss to write a final pièce de résistance: How to
Lose a Girl. Easier said than done when the girl he meets is Hannah Mayfield,
and he’s not sure he wants her to dump him.

Hannah is an extremely successful event
planner who’s focused on climbing the career ladder. Her firm is one of the most
prestigious in the city, and she’s determined to secure her next promotion. But
Hannah has a bit of an image problem. She needs to show her boss that she has
range, including planning dreaded, romantic weddings. Enter Jack. He’s the
perfect man to date for a couple weeks to prove to her boss that she’s not
scared of feelings.

Before Jack and Hannah know it, their
fake relationship starts to feel all too real—and neither of them can stand to
lose each other.”

I’m not a big fan of deception as a trope.
I love a fake relationship but where the deception is perpetrated on one main
character by the other? Not so much. In this case, there is deception galore.
Jack is lying to Hannah. Hannah is lying to Jack. And, of course, they are both
lying to themselves.

The latter three deceptions were fairly
easy for me to forgive. Sure Hannah is, just like Jack, pursuing a romantic
relationship under false pretences and not sharing that information with the
other party. However, there the similarities end.

Jack’s deception involves him being
purposely cruel, unkind and, occasionally creepy. His deception is destined to
end in humiliation for Hannah. How does he think it’s going to go when his article
laying the whole thing out is published? (I don’t know if it does come out. I
didn’t get that far. My point really is that he intended for it to come
out. That was enough.) Hannah, her friends, her colleagues and random strangers
on the street will know that Jack dated her in order to humiliate and abuse
her. So, his terrible treatment of her will then be something to embarrass and
hurt her in perpetuity – because the internet is forever. And I just couldn’t
get behind that. I tried. But I couldn’t.

Jack’s reasoning is that in the past he has
blown career opportunities for a relationship and in the end he’s still lost
the girl. So this time he’s choosing his career, even though he hates himself
for it. The thing is, I think that’s the wrong calculus. He’s not choosing his career
over Hannah. He’s choosing his career over his ethics. But he chose to
throw another person under a bus and that spoke to me of his judgement and
morals and none of those things were good. How is it heroic to choose to
hurt someone else?

Hannah had been hurt before by awful men
and Jack was just another one. In some ways his behaviour is even worse than
the others because he’s doing it for career advancement and not even because he
thinks that kind of behaviour is okay.

I liked Hannah very much. She’s prickly and
well-armoured but has a very soft core. Jack did not take care of it and I
could not forgive him for that. She deserved better.

The narration is superb. January LaVoy is
brilliant, with a wonderfully deep husky hero voice and a wide variety of other
voices and accents. Her timing is excellent. After a couple of recent listens
where insufficient space was left between sentences and paragraphs it was truly
a delight to listen to Ms. LaVoy’s impeccable pacing.

If anyone was going to convince me to keep
going it would have been Ms. LaVoy’s narration. She kept me listening after my
initial discomfort with the premise and quite a way into Jack’s increasingly
desperate attempts to get Hannah to dump him. But when Jack’s behaviour bled
into truly humiliating and douchey even January LaVoy couldn’t keep me listening.

I feel bad about this because there are
things in the book to enjoy. There is some very hot sex and sparkling humour, a
great female friendship and, as I said, Hannah is wonderful. But the premise is
the necessary thread that goes throughout the whole book. This trope is not my
jam and in hindsight, I ought not to have accepted the book for review.

Note: DNF is reader-speak for Did Not Finish.