Can a curse stop you to find love, or will it make you find Love?

Synopsis

CELESTE thought she had long forgotten the sweet, citrusy kiss she shared with TRAVIS during a game of spin the bottle. Splitting her time between her accounts office in super Instagrammable Notting Hill, and her tiny apartment in quirky Exmouth Market, modern-day life is simply too busy for men. Besides, whenever she tries to find The One, it always ends in disaster. From Tinder tragedies to trampolining tribulations, Celeste is starting to think that she’s cursed.

But then Travis begins to pop up wherever she goes, and Celeste knows with stomach-sinking clarity that fate has finally caught up with them. Inspired by the idea of fake dating, Celeste is convinced the only way out of this mess is to call the curse’s bluff. But will Travis agree to it? And how can she manage not to fall in love?

Pour yourself a lemonade and escape with this gorgeous will-they-won’t-they rom-com set between London and Gibraltar!

My review

Celeste truly believes that the game of Spin The Bottle she played years ago has cursed her. Every date she had, has turned out into a disaster somehow. To make things even worse, now she starts to see Travis, whom she shared a kiss with during that game, everywhere.
As she believes that to lift the curse there is only one option, she is ready to bluff fate over, by fake – dating Travis. But is Travis willing to play her game?  

Whenever I start to read a story by this author, I know I have to keep an open mind, and not overthink about things like curses, spells and even time – travelling.
Even if those things seem impossible in reality, why can it not be happening in books?  

I was very intrigued about the whole aspect of a little game to be an actual curse. And how it affected Celeste in her love life.
And I found it a bit bizarre how Celeste truly believed in that curse, even as an adult woman and even going that far to avoid anything with lemons.
For a moment I even thought, just like her best friend, that Celeste was getting a bit delusional when she sees Travis suddenly everywhere. 

Now that I mentioned her best friend, can I just say that for a big part of the story I didn’t like her? I found her patronizing and even selfish at moments… but I was glad that towards the end she saw the light. 

Back to Celeste and Travis now 😊 

For us readers, the idea of fake – dating, we know that it will never end up like just that. We *know* that things are going to evolve somehow, no matter how hard the main characters try to avoid that.
Yet these fake dates turned out to be the weirdest ones I have ever read…
If it’s not the small talk that doesn’t work, there will for certain rise another issue! It made it difficult at moments to like Travis and his lacklustre behaviour. But at other moments he also had me in complete laughs.  

However, he redeems himself when the truth comes out and we can actually see that his behaviour is not because of his disinterest, but because of his own feelings of shame concerning his situation.
That only shows us that there is more to people than they will initially show is. 

There were several moments that put a smile on my face, but also moments that broke my heart… Yet what didn’t take away I truly enjoyed reading this funny, magical story, about how one ‘silly’ game may be exactly what we need, even if we don’t know that yet as a teenager or even an adult.
With this story we see that somehow love always finds its way to us, no matter how long or how far it takes…  

And as a cherry on top of the (lemon?) cake, there are a few cameo’s that I absolutely adored!