A review by cmucce01
Red String Theory by Lauren Kung Jessen

2.0

I wanted to love this book. Honest. An artist and a NASA engineer with conflicting views on fate and destiny meet serendipitously and then fall in love? Yes, please. But the NASA engineer was over-the-top wooden and Rooney Something Gao — literally, her middle name is Something — was too quirky for words. Seriously — apart from the ridiculous middle name, she’s also afraid of butterflies, wears only hand-knitted red wool items (for the red strings in the title, get it? Get it?), and firmly believes that dumplings taste better after midnight like some weird Gremlin. (Fact: Dumplings are delicious 24/7.) I was all set to rate this three stars UNTIL the wooden MMC receives a letter from his absentee parents that make him decide somehow that he can’t be with Rooney after all. I expected some kind of big black moment (hellooo, it’s a romance novel!) but this one straight up made no sense and just made me angry. There were lots of emotional moments in the story where the reader was expected to make a leap to understand the characters and I prefer romances that lay everything out on the page. But I was ready to throw the whole book away at the 80% mark and am only giving it two stars because the premise itself was darling.