One of the Guys by Lisa Aldin

One of the Guys by Lisa Aldin
Published by Spencer Hill Press on February 10, 2015
Genres: Contemporary, Love & Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 320

Amazon • Book Depository •

Tomboy to the core, Toni Valentine understands guys. She'll take horror movies, monster hunts and burping contests over manicures. So Toni is horrified when she's sent to the Winston Academy for Girls, where she has to wear a skirt and learn to be a "lady" while the guys move on without her. Then Toni meets Emma Elizabeth, a girl at school with boy troubles, and she volunteers one of her friends as a pretend date. Word spreads of Toni s connections with boys, and she discovers that her new wealthy female classmates will pay big money for fake dates. Looking for a way to connect her old best friends with her new life at school, Toni and Emma start up Toni Valentine s Rent-A-Gent Service. But the business meets a scandal when Toni falls for one of her friends--the same guy who happens to be the most sought-after date. With everything she's built on the line, Toni has to decide if she wants to save the business and her old life, or let go of being one of the guys for a chance at love.

Romantic fluffs aren’t really my thing–they’re kind of like a guilty pleasure that I can’t totally take seriously, but cheer me up nevertheless. One of the Guys fit my need for a little cheesy romance almost perfectly and getting approved on NetGalley made me stop, drop, and read.
Here’s the gist of the review: the story itself had an insanely cute idea–it was just a matter of executing it and that’s evidently where the story fell a bit short. I loved the bits between our two love interests. It was just the bits in between I wasn’t a fan of.

Let’s start with Tori (aka Tonya aka McRib). I was not the biggest fan of her. She irritated me so many times and her wild ideas could only read lead to trouble. She was too impulsive and reckless and sometimes a bit…whiny. The prank she pulled in the beginning of the book, especially, were surprisingly ridiculous and incredibly juvenile (and I’m saying this as a 14 year old, folks). I may or may not have rolled my eyes at several of the things Tori let out her mouth.
As for the other characters, I didn’t really feel like we got to know them. With Emma, she just pops up suddenly and becomes Tori’s new BFF almost instantaneously. She pops up here and there and her sole purpose seems to mainly be Tori’s business partner and her liaison to the girl world, if you will.
And Tori’s old best friends? They did each have a different type of personality, but they were unbelievably generic. There was the rude kind of bad boy one, the nerdy and shy one, and then Loch who was basically Mr. Perfect (and thus, the love interest.) I didn’t really feel like any of them were extremely well developed–though I did like Ollie and definitely agreed with him on certain fronts.

The romance itself was severely underdeveloped and I do wish there was more depth to it. It was adorable, but there wasn’t much to it besides a few stray glances and shy touches. It might’ve been because we don’t really understand the bond between Tori and her boys as we start near the end of their group, but that’s another thing to touch on–how little we felt from their so called friendship. If anything, Ollie and Tori didn’t act like they’d ever been close and Cowboy was just…there.

I did enjoy bits and pieces of it, but the technicalities and the actual writing were sorely off point for me to enjoy it fully. I guess I’d still recommend it if this sounds more your style (like I said, I don’t read many fluffs!), but if you just like reading something a bit cheesy and cute very very rarely, this one may not be for you.

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