After getting dumped by her long-time boyfriend right before their couple’s weekend in Ireland, aspiring screenwriter Cara decides to take the trip solo. Upon arriving sans luggage, Cara meets Finn; a handsome rideshare driver whom she ends up running into multiple times throughout her trip. On the last day of her trip, which happens to be Leap Day, Cara ends up going to hear Finn’s band play at a bar…where too much alcohol has Cara embracing a certain Irish Tradition. Upon waking up next to Finn with a tinfoil ring on her finger and learning that there is no way to quickly undo their impromptu wedding, newlywed Cara heads home to her demanding job in LA with her husband Finn and his dog in tow. Living with her new husband turns out to be way better than expected and ultimately Cara and Finn decide to postpone their marriage’s inevitable end. After Cara’s connections in the film industry help Finn land the acting role of a lifetime, new information comes to light that has Cara questioning her budding romance with Finn. Lucky Leap Day is a closed-door new adult romance novel that invokes the stuck together, fake relationships, vacation romance, friends to lovers, and there’s only one bed tropes. This book would be perfect for fans of People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, Kisses and Croissants by Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau, The Summer of Broken Rules by K. L. Walther, and Shipped by Angie Hockman. Lucky Leap Day deals with themes such as change versus tradition, displacement, companionship and loneliness, character, fate versus freewill, facing reality, love and heartbreak, truth and lies, history and culture, and job struggles. I believe that the moral of this story is to take control of your own destiny.
In terms of cons, I don’t want to give anything away but, in my opinion, I found that the “conflict” towards the end of the novel was guessable; it would have been a lot more engaging and interesting if the drama was more unexpected and less predictable. Since I’m not a fan of books that flash back and forth in time, I didn’t like the chapter layout whereby we learn that Cara has married a virtual stranger in the first chapter and then we flash back to discover how Cara and Finn met/ got together before (finally) getting to see the fallout of their Leap Day marriage. Furthermore, even though Cara and Finn’s pre-nuptial adventures were short-lived, in my opinion, since we already knew what the outcome would be, the flashbacks at the beginning made it hard for me to get excited about the novel. Similarly, I didn’t understand why the epilogue was told from Finn’s dog Oscar’s perspective; since all the other chapters were told from Cara’s perspective, the change of perspective in the epilogue was a bit jarring. Lastly, I don’t have a big interest in history, so I didn’t enjoy reading the side story about the Irish Rebellion, which mostly took place during Cara’s tour of an Irish jail.
Overall, Lucky Leap Day was a cute and relatively clean romance novel with a happily ever after that would be perfect for fans of travel, adventure, and spontaneity; especially people who fantasize about travelling to Ireland and enjoy Irish accents!
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February 2024
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