Bea is a plus-sized, fashion influencer who is working to build her empire around self-love and body acceptance. When she uses her blog to publicly speak out about the lack of diverse representation on the hit show “Main Squeeze” (a bachelor/bachelorette-type reality show) she winds up finding herself the star of the next season.
Forever the pragmatist, Bea doesn’t think it’s realistic to expect to find love on the show but she agrees to the project nonetheless, hoping the exposure will help boost her brand and that plus-sized representation on the show would be inspiring to women everywhere. But Bea’s experience on the show is far from a good time. From a man that took one look at her in the introduction episode and walked off set to men that taunted her for her weight behind her back but played nice on set (in hopes of being the star of a future season), Bea struggles to maintain her own sense of self while trying to determine which bachelors are authentic and there for to find love with her.
Cleverly told in an episodic style to match Bea’s week-to-week experience on “Main Squeeze”, Stayman-London tells a page-turning tale about love in a variety of shapes and sizes. As a reader, who is slowly coming around to the romance genre and I have to stay, of the handful I’ve read in the last couple of month — all ones that are popular with the book-tok/tube/gram or nominees for Goodread’s Choice Awards — this one was one of the highlights for me.
Not only did I find Bea to be quirky and super relatable, but I appreciated that Stayman-London took the time to develop the characters we were seeing. I’ve been discovering that a pet peeve of mine (in the romance genre especially) is the immense amount of telling rather than showing. Seriously, the amount of enemies-to-lovers romance books that I’ve read where the main character declares one to be their “nemesis” even though the character has barely done anything even off-putting drives me up a wall (but maybe I’ll get into that another day.) Instead, we learn about the characters as Bea gets to know them as romantic interests and I think it works well for the story.
I also appreciated the Bea felt so human. She had awkward moments, she made false assumptions about people, and sometimes she had to put her ego aside and apologize. She was not the protagonist who smoothly sails — even through rough patches — to the end of the story and the consequences she faced felt appropriate for the situations, which I think only served to make her feel more relatable. And by the end, I couldn’t help but root for her.
And I can’t wrap up my review for this book without a kudos to Stayman-London for the inclusion of an asexual character. While the tides of inclusion seem to be changing in general, it was really great to see an asexual character represented without negative judgement — and in a romance novel!
One To Watch was a quick, fun, heartwarming read that was perfect for a cold January day. (And one that I’ll probably re-read while basking in the summer sunshine!)
