I'm sure this book works great for some people, unfortunately I was bored. I finally quit reading when my significant other looked at me and said, "If you keep getting mad at the book you're getting your tablet taken away." So, I put it down, read another book, tried coming back to this and by 50% I gave up.

Not only is the writing style hard to enjoy, but the characters are immature and the general flow is like watching my own life happen day in and day out. Boring. I generally enjoy friends to lovers story lines, however this was slow paced and predictable. Olivia, or Liv, isn't an enjoyable character, at all. I felt for her at first, but then I realized every situation in her life has been something she's inserted herself into. Her ex did to her as he did to others, she led on a younger guy, she makes people her friends without any real knowledge, and pushes comfort bounds with every single character. As a reader I couldn't connect with Liv and her flightiness, which meant I also never connected with any of the secondary characters. Then there is Nicholas, who sometimes acts like he is 18, other times 15, and the majority of the time like an overworked middle aged man. Considering age difference was such a huge deal between Olivia and Nicholas, I thought this would be played out much differently. In the end, I thought Nicholas was more mature and he should've been wondering why he was paying attention to a twenty-something who dated like a middle school child does. I genuinely liked him as a character, in fact he could have a whole book about his personal life and angst, but since he did everything exactly like Liv asked him to he came across more like flat Stanley (you know that project you did in elementary school).

Like other reviewers shared, the book is rich in detail, especially when it comes to food, but the story of Olivia and Nicholas fell flat for me. ( )

I was given a copy of this book by the publisher on Netgalley for an honest review. I wanted to like this book but found that I was just struggling to get through it. It's not the fault of the male lead. Nicolas is a sweet 18-year-old genius who has graduated college and is now in law school. One of his classmates, Olivia or Liv, asks him to join their study group. While he's more of a loner because of his circumstances, he agrees because he's attracted to Liv.
Olivia is coming off a broken engagement. On a positive note, she studies hard in school. In almost every other respect she is completely unlikeable. The circumstances of her engagement (she found out after she had been dating the guy that he was engaged to someone else She makes him break it off and gets engaged to him herself to find out that he has been cheating on her all along - duh) are ridiculous. The way she treats Nicolas is demeaning because as she says every other page, he's only eighteen and five years younger than her. She seems oblivious to the fact that she acts like a fifteen-year-old high school student herself. I was hoping that I'd see some growth from her as the book moved along, but not really. She continues to be controlling and immature right to the end.
The plot is slow, a lot of cooking and traveling, but because it's all from Liv's POV it tends to be centered around her and her feelings about it (because she's the best cook - 'Nicolas, eat crawfish' and has traveled on the California coast more than Nicolas). I don't want to give away the back drama around Nicolas, but it was fairly predictable yet written in an overly-dramatic manner. Liv's petulance at not knowing it all 'right now' was also annoying and immature.
It's too bad because I like stories where the hero is a bit nerdy, but this one just wasn't my cup of tea. ( )