Genre: Romance/Christmas
Hardcover; Trade Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781635112740; 9781635112719
Henery Press Publishing
288 Pages
$31.00; $15.95; $2.99 Amazon
November 7, 2017
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First meet Robyn Lane. She's always dated struggling creative types, including her current squeeze (Perry, an actor). For this year's Chrismukkah celebration, her parents would love her to bring someone stable, reliable, steadily employed. You know, with health insurance and a 401(k).
Now let's meet Sidney Bellows. Her parents already plan her professional life (she's an attorney at her father's law firm). If she brings her current boyfriend (Will, an attorney) to the family Christmas extravaganza, her parents will have their wedding planned by New Year's Eve.
Leave it to a mutual friend (and copious amounts of wine) to find a playful solution: Swap those boyfriends, fool the parents, and enjoy the holidays. It's perfect! Robyn can show off a successful attorney boyfriend, and Sidney's high-society family won't ring those wedding bells when they meet a flaky actor beau.
The fun isn't in the theory, it's in the practice.
Will turns out to be the boy-next-door Robyn crushed on hard throughout her teenage years. Sidney's family fawns all over Perry like he's an Oscar-winner rather than a D-list wannabe.
Fool the parents? Enjoy the holidays? Swapping boyfriends never sounded so good or went so bad.
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Robyn Lane is a music teacher who, along with her roommate, Anne Marie, is having a girls' night out wine party. Asked to attend is Anne Marie's boss, Sidney Bellows, a driven attorney who needs to get away from her office and an annoying co-worker for awhile.
Both women are dreading the coming Christmas festivities with their families. Robyn's parents hate anyone she's interested in - laid back, artistic types; and Sidney's father, also an attorney and head of the firm she works for, lives, eats and breathes law. Her current boyfriend is also an attorney, but Sidney doesn't want to subject him to her father, because she knows it will be all work and no fun.
After imbibing a few too many, Sidney comes up with a foolproof plan: What if, just for a few days, they swap boyfriends to fool their parents? Robyn can bring Sidney's boyfriend Will, and Sidney can bring Perry, Robyn's actor boyfriend - it's perfect. While Robyn balks at first, Sidney is used to getting her way - after all, she's been formally trained just for that.
When Robyn agrees to the exchange, the next step is to have everyone meet each other and propose the plan to Will and Perry. Robyn's surprised when she recognizes Will as someone she grew up with and had a crush on in high school; and Sidney, seeing Perry, thinks he's the most gorgeous man she's ever seen. While Perry is willing (thinking he can hone his acting skills), Will is harder to convince, until he "overhears" a staged conversation Sidney is supposedly having with her father.
With everything in place, it all seems like it's going swimmingly. Robyn's parents are glad to have Will back into the fold, and unfortunately for Robyn, mention her girlhood crush...which she still has, unbeknownst to Will.
Sidney, on the other hand, is stunned when she realizes that her parents absolutely love Perry. Her firm's specialty is entertainment law, and her father offers to help him; her mother thinks he's charming. Sidney, however, isn't pleased by the fact that Perry isn't 'sticking to the script' and unhappily begins to realize this is one situation she's losing control of, which angers her.
What ensues is a comedy of errors while the two women try to get through their time at home and return to their former lives. But what they're soon figuring out is that going back to the way things were before isn't as easy as they thought it would be; and maybe they don't want to do so after all...
On the one hand, I thought this book was pretty cute. It's a nice semi-sweet tale of what we think we want and discover it's not what we really want at all. Although I felt that Sidney's transformation was much greater than Robyn's - Sidney's had a lot to do with wanting a piece of her own life to remain just that, while Robyn's appeared to be that she had been stuck in an eternal one-sided relationship for years; I did think that having truthful conversations with their respective sets of parents might have been in order for some time coming.
However, I also felt it was perfect for a quick Christmas feel-good read; and quite a nice story. Recommended if you need something to cozy up to on a cold winter evening.
https://www.amazon.com/Boyfriend-Swap-Meredith-Schorr/dp/1635112745/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2211288133
More on Meredith Schorr's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/s/meredith-schorr/
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