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A review by lezreadalot
Scissor Link by Georgette Kaplan
3.0
What a wonderful thing to be able to go and get Wendy back on her skin, whenever she chose.
Well... this is kinda unfortunate! When I updated around 1/3 of the way through the book, I was so optimistic and really enjoying myself with this romance, and I figured it would only go up from there. But alas, it went down. I don't think it's a bad book, but after the halfway mark, it started to lose its charm, wasn't half as funny, and the characters did and said some things that rubbed me the wrong way. 3 stars isn't a bad rating, but for a book that started off SO WELL, I'm disappointed that this is what I'm landing on.
This is an age gap, boss-employee workplace rom-com. Rom-coms are always so hit or miss for me, because if my sense of humour doesn't align with the author's, then it can start feeling tedious and try-hard. But I really loved the way this was told at first, and the humour was spot on. A bit eye-roll worthy at times, a little over the top, but so funny. I loved Wendy's voice, how quippy and sarcastic she was, and on more than one occasion, I actually burst out laughing. Which does not happen often to me. Wendy falls heads over heels for an older woman in an elevator, a woman who she later comes to realise is her boss at this big aerospace company. And everything about the way it was described was so funny and sweet and charming and again, genuinely funny. The author uses a lot of real life references and pop culture references, but in a way that actually wasn't obnoxious. And for me, that's saying something, because I almost ALWAYS think pop culture references are obnoxious. That was in Wendy's POV. Janet's POV, at least at first, was starkly different in a way I really enjoyed. She recently separated from her wife, and is just going through the motions, dealing with her feelings about that, and then Wendy unexpectedly swoops into her life. Their flirting was so good. Their banter was everything. The scene with the soup had me in stitches. This was a true rom-com in every sense of the word, and I was eating it up. I loved the scenes with Wendy's sister and her family; that was such a fun dynamic and made me smile a lot.
Things started to go downhill maybe halfway through? A little before that, even. Like, I didn't like the pacing. Things seemed to be moving forward sexually waaaaay faster than they moved romantically. That definitely isn't a bad thing, but the romance really never seemed like it caught up. I have a great idea of why each of these women are attracted to each other, and how great they are in bed, but the romance was negligible. We moved from one point to the other soo quickly. I like a good taboo boss/employee romance when it's done well, but they were so blasé and casual about it. There are reasons for that, on Wendy's side, but I couldn't believe that Janet didn't hesitate at least a little. Some of the sexy, fun shenanigans were kinda uncomfortable, because there was no discussion.
Spoiler
Like, Janet making Wendy record that sexy email, the stuff that happened in the office, Wendy promising that she would delete Janet's photos while thinking 'I'm not gonna delete them! :D'Also, for more than half the book, I forgot what their jobs were, because they barely talked about it. But then they did start talking about it, about schematics and planes and weapons and working for the army and stratagems for war and both women became abruptly so much less attractive to me, lol. Is that shallow? Sorry!! I don't care about military contractors or whatever. I found the conflict to be clumsy, and there are certain characters that should have been introduced way earlier, if they were going to play a part in the ending. All the humour and references to movies and TV shows that I had found so amusing in the beginning started to really grate on my nerves. Like, there were just SO many of them, it started to feel a little forced. The relationship conflict at the end felt like it had no weight, because again, the book had not sufficiently convinced me they had real feelings for each other. As a romance, this started off so well, but then just fizzled.
(This is also pretty shallow, but I was hoping for dominant, butch-leaning Wendy, and I did not get that lol. It literally happened once upon a dream, and never again.)
Listened to the audiobook as read by Anastasia Watley, which makes me even sadder that this gets such a mid rating from me. Because this might be one of my favourites that she's ever narrated. She did such a good job with the humour, the timing of Wendy's little jokes, the intonation on some of those one-liners. It was soooo good. While this was a bit of a disappointment, I still want to read more from the author. There were lots of great things about the writing, but the book just wasn't as well-rounded as I might have liked.