The Book:
Right Girl, Wrong Side by Ginny Baird
Published March 28, 2023 by Sourcebooks Casablanca
Date read: March 18, 2023
The Characters:
Evita and Ryan
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
Busy flower shop manager Evita Machado can’t wait to get to Nantucket. With a bad breakup behind her, relaxing at the shore with her folks and her brothers and their families sounds like the sure cure for heartache, and their vacation destination looks like an amazing place! But when they arrive at the quaint rose-covered cottage, another group has already put down stakes: the Hatfields.
Ryan Hatfield was Evita’s former crush from high school, but their business rival moms refused to let them date. Now history professor Ryan is here for a week with his parents, who won them this oceanfront rental in a society silent auction. Once it’s clear there’s been a double-booking due to a bidding mistake, Ryan’s mom digs in her heels, meaning to stay. When Evita’s mom won’t back down either, both sides tepidly agree to share the luxury accommodations by dividing the cozy space.
With the boisterous Machados livening things up and the strait-laced Hatfields tamping them down, can Evita and Ryan keep the peace between the warring factions while fostering a growing chemistry between the two of them?
The Review:
While I enjoyed this Romeo and Juliet – adjacent retelling (no one dies!), I think I would have enjoyed it more if I read the book instead of listening to the audio. A big plot point was Ryan, the MMC, deciding whether to stay at his small no-name college or switch to working at Wellesley, well-known in the Mass area. The narrator pronounced it “wuh-Leslie” every time (instead of wells-lee), and it really took me out of the story! Had the college been mentioned once or twice I would have chuckled to myself and moved on, but it was near-constant.
The story itself was cute–a forced-proximity forbidden romance, when the two rival moms both are told they’ve won the same vacation house for a week. The antics between the two families were a lot of fun to read.
I didn’t find myself particularly connected to Ryan and Evita’s romance. They didn’t seem to spend much time connecting on their own, which made it hard for the romance to develop.
My other pet peeve was that Ryan apparently proposed before Evita every said “I love you”. I’m not sure if I just mis-heard that on audio, but that was confusing to me!
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