Mr. Right Across the Street

by Kathryn Freeman

Mr Right Across the Street is a very sweet, very hot, slow-burn romance. Mia Abbott is building a new life in Manchester, where she has moved after her last relationship ended in the kind of unpleasantries that lead to changing cities and phone numbers. For the first time in her life, she is living alone and far from her family, and she is enjoying the opportunity to rediscover herself as an independent woman. She is also enjoying the fact that the flat across the street is occupied by a really hot guy who works out in front of his window at 10am every morning.

Luke Doyle is that hot guy. He has his own issues and secrets, and he doesn’t do relationships – but he certainly does do one-night stands and friends with benefits. Lots of them. He’s reasonably ethical about it, but he is also rather wilfully obtuse about the fact that some of his lovers are hoping for more. Naturally, he falls for Mia the first time she walks into his bar. But Mia isn’t interested in dating a player – not even one who invites her out on ‘not-dates’ by writing her notes and putting them in his window where she will see them.

Mia and Luke’s growing friendship was genuinely lovely, and I adored the communication-by-window-sign take on the epistolary novel. I especially loved Luke’s patience with Mia’s wariness of him – he’s frank about his attraction to her, but he is very careful not to push, and when she refuses to give him her number and explains why, he just shrugs and says he’ll have to invest in larger paper then. His respect for her boundaries was super hot, honestly.
I also liked the friendships Mia built with the people she met in Manchester, from her grumpy elderly neighbour, Stan, to the women she meets at the bar (at least one of whom is an ex of Luke’s). And the sense of place was fantastic – Luke’s ‘sights of Manchester’ were really fun and a bit different.

There were a couple of things I didn’t like so much, though. Mia is distrustful of men, and doesn’t want a relationship… so her attraction to Luke is a problem for her. She deals with it by leaping to the worst possible conclusions about him at every opportunity. Granted, he gives her plenty of ammunition – he has a lot of exes, and they do keep on turning up in his bar, on his phone, and in his flat. But it did mean that we had this repeated cycle of Luke and Mia having fun together and drawing closer, Mia almost deciding that maybe she could have romantic feelings for Luke, one of Luke’s exes making an appearance, and Mia running for the hills. Again, and again, and again. While this was understandable, it also got pretty exasperating to read.

There is also a fairly major plot twist about 60% of the way through the book, which seems to take the relationship back to square one. The plot twist itself was well done, but it did rely a lot on some stereotypes about jealous exes that made me uncomfortable. And speaking of uncomfortable stereotypes, I also didn’t love the way Stan was portrayed, which felt a bit fat-shamey to me.

Despite that, this really was a ridiculously cute story, and I had fun reading it. There were some deliciously funny moments (Luke’s name for his penis had me giggling hysterically for about ten minutes, because I am very immature and also can’t resist a clever pun), and I loved the friendship and chemistry between Luke and Mia. I’m giving this a B minus.

– Catherine Heloise

Contemporary Romance, Romance