Review: Juliette & the Monday ManDates by Becky Doughty

Series: The Gustafson Girls #1
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: BraveHearts Publishing
Released: Sept. 1, 2014
322 pages

About the Book:

Juliette Gustafson is heart-broken after waiting nearly ten years for a proposal from her boyfriend that never came. Determining she isn’t “getting over Mike” quickly enough, her three younger sisters come up with The Monday ManDates; an intervention plan requiring Juliette to endure what turns out to be a series of remarkably disastrous blind dates. Between TheraPaul, Frisky Frank, TAZ the rock star, and the stoic Tim Larsen, the Monday ManDates are doomed from the start. Then there’s Victor Jarrett, the police officer with an affinity for pulling Juliette over when she’s at her very worst. But no one is more surprised than Juliette when she meets the one man who can right the wrongs in her past and change her future, if she will only let herself fall in love with him. 

  

My Rating & Thoughts:    ⭐⭐⭐

Juliette has recently gone through a break-up with her long-term boyfriend. Her sisters decide to set her up on a series of blind dates, she doesn’t want to do this but goes along with it to make them happy. The dates don’t go well at first, but then during one of them she ends up accepting Jesus into her heart. The story follows Juliette as she is learning to follow Jesus and what that all means. There is a situation from the past that had a major impact on her life (beside the breakup) and Juliette thought she had dealt with the feelings from that, but God is bringing it to the surface and showing her how he wants her to handle it. Meanwhile Juliette keeps having unexpected run ins with a certain police officer, Victor, and he is making her feel things she hasn’t felt before. I enjoyed following Juliette as she came to believe in Jesus and the message of forgiveness that was spread throughout the story, however I didn’t like most of the characters. Victor had a tendency to believe the worst about Juliette and treated her pretty awful at times. There was an incident that happened with the ex-boyfriend that had me asking why it took so long for help to arrive when they were right next door and then no answers were provided about what happened to the ex-boyfriend. I struggled to connect with the main characters. The characters I did like were the minor characters who were telling Victor off about his attitude. I have no desire to pick up the rest of the series. 

(I purchased my copy of this book; opinions expressed 

in this review are my honest opinion and completely my own.)