Book Review: Love at First Set
Author Jennifer Dugan makes the jump to the world of adult romance with her new novel Love at First Set. The story follows Lizzie, an aspiring gym owner who works the front desk at a family-owned gym franchise in the meantime. Her best friend James, who also happens to be the owner’s son asks her to accompany him to his sister’s wedding, telling her she can get to know his parents better while she angles for a promotion.
Easy enough, until she finds an attractive woman crying her eyes out in the bathroom. Adhering to girl code, she hypes the mystery woman up, encouraging her to put aside whoever is making her so unhappy. The woman takes her advice to heart. The only problem? The crying woman is the bride, Cara.
Lizzie becomes desperate to keep the truth of this from James and his parents, worried how it will harm her employment if they find out she’s the reason Cara walked out of her perfectly planned society wedding to a crypto bro with political aspirations. When Cara moves in with James determined to change her life, she and Lizzie grow closer and closer, their feelings eventually clawing out from a tangled web of half-truths and blossoming into love.
As far as romance novels go, Love at First Set is on the funnier side. There are some genuinely hilarious moments with Lizzie trying and failing to play it cool in front of Cara and her parents, and one scene in particular at the wedding that will never fail to crack me up.
Where the comedy triumphs, however, I found the romance stumbled. Not that they don’t have chemistry. They absolutely do. But both Cara and Lizzie have such serious hang-ups and trauma associated with their parents, things that very nearly drove them apart — though mercifully their being queer is not the problem in either case. My heart went out to Lizzie, in particular, who often got pulled into everyone else’s narrative, and by the end, I worried she hadn’t fully claimed her own story.
As a character, she was so refreshing in that she really did not have it all figured out, and by the end still doesn’t seem to have it all figured out, though she’s definitely on her way. I just wish she had been given a more explicit “take charge” moment to face down everyone that ever made her feel unworthy or less than. She is so often used by a pawn even by those meant to love her. It was miscommunication taken to an extreme that made me sad for Lizzie, because I don’t know how she’s supposed to trust Cara and James ever again. Her trust issues were a problem for her at the start of the book, and I’m not sure how they improved by the end, sadly.
I wanted to love this book, I really did. The relationship was cute, and the heroine was someone I want to give a big, crushing, bear hug to. In the end, unfortunately, it was just fine.
Love at First Set is out May 23, 2023. Special thank you to Avon for the advance copy for review purposes.