Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

Friends-to-lovers usually runs on suppression, and Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating runs on the opposite fuel, which is total, catastrophic disclosure. Christina Lauren's most purely joyful book pairs the genre's least filtered heroine with its most unflappable hero and then — in the premise the desk considers quietly ingenious — has them refuse the obvious conclusion so thoroughly that they start setting each other up with other people, conducting their courtship as a series of double blind dates in which the wrong pairs face each other across the table and the right pair laughs down the middle. The reader is not fooled. The reader is not meant to be. The pleasure is watching two people build the evidence file against their own denial.

Hazel Bradford is the book's engine and the desk's beloved: a kindergarten teacher with a rescue-animal menagerie, no volume control, and a policy of being exactly herself at all times, having learnt young that the alternative pays nothing and costs everything. Men find her delightful for three dates and exhausting by the fifth, a pattern she narrates without self-pity. Josh Im is a physical therapist of legendary calm, freshly burnt by a cheating ex, and the one person who has known Hazel since a college era she considers evidence of nothing. When her life briefly combusts, she lands in his orbit as a roommate-adjacent fixture, and the not-dating guide assembles itself. They are friends, friends set friends up, and the double dates that follow are the book's comic showcase, each one a small disaster that ends with Josh and Hazel closing the restaurant together.

What the desk admires is the thesis under the froth. Hazel's whole arc is the radical proposition that a woman should not have to be a reduced edition to be loved, and Josh — whose calm is not blandness but attention — is the book's proof of concept: the man who has not asked her, in a decade of knowing her, to be less. The Korean family texture, the sibling meddling, and the menagerie all earn their pages.

Honest notices: the chaos-heroine register is a flavour, and readers who need their leads restrained should sit elsewhere; a late development is classic Christina Lauren and the desk keeps it. Heat is high and cheerful.

Who is this for? Friends-to-lovers readers who like the friendship loud, anyone who has ever been called too much by someone insufficient, and every menagerie household. Bring snacks for the dates, which will not go well, wonderfully, and by design. The desk reread this one during a difficult month and reports full efficacy. Some books are medicine with a menagerie. This is the dosage.