Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Match Game

Match Game
Match Game
Author: Beverly Brandt
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Romance
Book Type: Paperback
Readnmachine avatar reviewed on + 1439 more book reviews


A light-hearted chicklit that neither strains your brain nor insults your intelligence.

Sure, they Meet Cute (she's wearing a fish costume and about the be struck down by a runaway gelato cart), sparks fly, there's The Misunderstanding (she's misinformed about his sexual orientation), the Slow Build (complicated by The Misunderstanding), followed by the Big Reveal, the Hot Monkey Sex, and The Menace to It All, which has to be defeated before the Happy Ever After.

That's all formulaic stuff, but Brandt's light hand and a heroine who's not a ditz -- a little klutzy, yes, and a bit slow on the uptake, lift this one above the average for the genre.

Heroine Savannah Taylor is a bit of an anal-compulsive, planning her wedding to Mr. Obviously Not Right with the care and precision of a Moon shot, only to have her big day ruined by a pesky arrest warrant ending in cuffs around the wrist rather than a ring on the finger. It gets cleared up â her identity has been stolen, and those unpaid bills and questionable financial dealings aren't hers at all â but not until Mr. ONR has decided she's too much trouble for wife material. She decides the answer to her broken heart and oh-so-boring accountant job is to take off for Florida and run down the woman who stole her identity and ruined her life, and maybe kick up her heels a bit along the way.

To support herself while she's chasing down her nemesis, Savannah takes a number of unsatisfying jobs (see fish costume, above), rents a room in a sleepy motel suddenly overrun with spring-break college students, and ultimately goes back to boring old accounting where â in a roaring coincidence that actually turns out to be less coincidental than one might think â she finds her identity thief, which is when things begin to get way too real for comfort.

Okay, the ending doesn't bear a whole lot of real close examination. What do you want -- great literature?

Just crank up the tunes, slather on some sunscreen, pour yourself an umbrella drink, and enjoy.