One to Watch

 

By Kate Stayman-London

Bea is a plus-size fashion blogger who enjoys watching a reality show, Main Squeeze, where a person looking for love is given a line-up of attractive possible matches from which to choose. But one evening Bea is rather struck by how similar all the candidates are, slim, attractive and hard to distinguish from one another. So she writes a blog about it causing a backlash against the show and a serious drop in its ratings. 

The show undergoes a change of management and the new producer comes to Bea and proposes she should be the next candidate looking for love. Bea only agrees if they provide a range of men who are more representative of average folks, not the perfect paragons the show usually features. They promise and Bea goes into seclusion as the show starts filming, which is the usual procedure for those kind of game/reality shows. 

But filming the first show, where Bea is introduced to the group of young men she is supposed to date and get to know over several weeks, she is displeased to see that all the men are the typical gorgeous hunks that Main Squeeze is known for, except for one pudgy fellow. The men were not told that they would be wooing a plus-size woman and the show producer failed to tell Bea that the men wouldn't know she wasn't the typical model-thin female the men would be expecting. But all of the men stay, except one man who quits in disgust. It later turns out that he instructed to do so by the producer, for the shock value and for ratings.

Bea suffers through it all, going on group dates where she overhears some of the men laughing at the idea of them dating a fat woman. Eventually, though, the candidates are whittled down to five men who seem really fond of and interested in having a relationship with Bea. What no one knows though is that Bea is still madly in love with a man she has known and loved for a very long time, a man who bedded her once then left her to marry someone else. How can Bea find a new love when she can't stop thinking about the old love?

This was an OK read. It's in the modern style where the story includes website chats, blog excerpts, podcasts and emails inserted into it. This is something I've encountered in the past and I've decided I don't much care for it. It adds very little to the flow of the story, I think. And I also found Bea's final choice to be kind of a jerk and a cold fish. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.