This was a dual first person PoV that I quickly tired of. It was so larded with cliché, and it had one of the main characters smoking, which is a huge turn-off for me. I mean it was already failing for me before then, but I was prepared to read on for a while; all that did was completely burn it for me.
It wasn't only the first person (barf) that spoiled it, either, but first person from two perspectives which is barf squared. Whenever I read that, it reminds me of two suspects being grilled by police, in different interrogation rooms, and it doesn't work. Well, it works for the police if they can catch them in a contradiction or get one to sell out the other, but it doesn't work as a tired plot device in fiction. 1PoV is bad enough and is usually horrible to read, but two of them just makes it so much worse. It's rare to find a 1PoV done well, let alone a two, and this sure wasn't one. The premise was wonderful - a March-June relationship (as opposed to a May-December or worse, a January-December which is frankly perverse), between two women, but the execution killed it.
I read at one point, "...but she had a symmetrical face. The customers would appreciate that" which strictly speaking isn't true. People like faces that are close to the average face they're used to. As far as symmetry goes, a study in 1996 discovered that children and young adults found those with slight facial asymmetry to be more attractive. It's a minor point, but let's not get hung up on perfection. Perfect faces, according to another study, might not be the signifier of good health that our long history has misled us to believe!
The story was marred by poor writing here and there. On one occasion I read, "With a sigh, I shoved my phone back in my designer purse." Really? You have to specify designer purse? That felt so pretentious that it about made me gag. I cannot read books written like that. I can't even take them seriously. Later I read, "With a sigh, I ran a hand along my head." Along? I can see ‘over’ my head or ‘down’ my face, but along? That's just weird. In and of themselves, things like this are not that important, unless there are many of them. Everyone screws up. Every author misses a grammatical or spelling problem here and there, or writes an awkward phrase now and then, but these added on top of other issues just make a novel unreadable for me.
Overall, I found this story plodding, tediously metronomic, and I did not like either character at all, so this was a DNF for sure. I can't commend it based on what I read.
