Perfect Distraction

Written by Allison Ashley

Narrated by Charlotte Claremont

Lauren Taylor isn't thinking about love, especially not with the impossibly attractive man she accidentally spilled coffee all over. He's out of her league and she's focused on finishing her oncology pharmacy residency. She's sworn off men who are too handsome for their own good, anyway.

Andrew Bishop can't stop thinking about the gorgeous redhead who crashed into him and then disappeared, even though he should have way more on his mind-like dealing with his Hodgkin Lymphoma diagnosis and finishing out his last year in law school. When Andrew and Lauren run into each other at the cancer center where she's working and he's being treated, they try to keep it professional. They can be friends, and nothing more.

But sometimes life has other plans . . .

Contains mature themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666161564

Allison Ashley

Allison Ashley is a science geek who enjoys coffee, craft beer, baking, and love stories. When she's not working at her day job as a clinical oncology pharmacist, she pens contemporary romances, usually with a medical twist. She lives in Oklahoma with her family and beloved rescue dog.

Reviews for Perfect Distraction

[Shrimp Perator · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

All in all, it's somewhat okay to listen to if you don't really focus on what's happening - as background noise basically. Other than that, I was disappointed. I was hoping for some genuine exploration of a serious illness, but the whole thing is just so shallow. I can't find any fault with the narrator, it's just the plot and writing that had me annoyed.

The male lead constantly acts like a complete child, is incredibly unlikable, jealous and somewhat creepy. But whatever he does never has any consequences for reasons unknown. It always just takes one weird, cringe-worthy, clichée laden speech to resolve any and all argument. And it's those incredibly weird speeches that annoyed me the most: they seem like they might have been spit out by an AI, fed with romcom dialogues. The characters are always so melodramatic with their constant speeches that are supposed to sound nice, but are so hollow and just a gigantic cluster of buzzwords and clichées. People just don't talk like that...

And then there is the cancer, which is basically a non-issue. Other than being a plot element to make the characters meet each other, it's basically as if it wasn't there. Sure, sometimes the main character suddenly remembers he has cancer and should be worried or something, but other than that, it's just treated as this little gimmick that doesn't seem to have any effect on him. Opposed to being, i don't know: a life threatening illness and chemotherapy with severe physical and mental side effects. Obviously he still has to look like a supermodel who an entire hospital's female staff wants to have sex with, despite being in the middle of chemotherapy... but he threw up once, so there's that!

The only real conflict (because the illness is not a conflict here, it might as well have been left out!), is the workplace overlap. He's a patient, she's somewhat involved in his treatment. But somehow the book does an incredible job at never fully explaining if there actually IS a conflict. At 80% in, it's still just portrayed as this weird ethical non-issue. At multiple points it is explicitly stated the main character isn't involved in the other character's treatment, but then suddenly she is again, and there is an ethical issue? At another point it was stated she was explicitly not allowed to date him and would get fired for it, but then suddenly it's treated as a grey area again.

And then there are these constant fadeouts, where we don't know what happened in the meantime. I'm still not sure if the characters were supposed to have been intimate on multiple occasions, because the scenes just suddenly ended and the book jumped a week into the future completely out of nowhere. There is nothing wrong with skipping parts of the story that aren't supposed to be the focus, but the reader still needs to know what the hell happened in between. And please don't skip, I don't know, VITAL PARTS OF THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. I'm so confused by the structuring. It's genuinely annoying and frustrating when the scene just abruptly ends, and suddenly it's a week later.

Other than that, it's just tons of romcom tropes thrown in where ever they fit, nothing creative or engaging. Romance doesn't have to be like this, but stories like this are the reason it has a bad rep. I should probably have been tipped off by the coffee-spilling referenced in the summary - probably the oldest trope out of the romcom handbook - but against all better judgement I gave this a try: never again.

[Yael Kaner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a original tale about a standard he's recovering trope. I enjoyed the male character very much. Well done.