New Book Review: Game Set Matchmaker

Title: Game Set Matchmaker 

Author: Evie Sterling

Date: 2023

Publisher: Evie Sterling

Quote: "How do you drive away from a guy you feel out-of-control, terrifying feelings for?...You keep your foot pressed to the gas, that's how."

Game Set Matchmaker is a sweet romance about a woman who runs a matchmaking service and a retired tennis champion. Do you deduct points for the title being too, too cute?

Given that you're interested in a sweet romance, that's about all you need to deduct points for. This is a sweet romance with a charming, socially confident introvert, volunteer teaching, the Appalachian Mountains (the Green Mountains, specifically), and shelter cats in it. Be still my heart. It would have been hard for Sterling, who did not write this book for me, to have tailor-fitted the atmosphere to my preferences any better, but toward the end of the book, at the ugly holiday sweater party, she does. 

It's still frivolous froth, intended strictly for use as a marital aid, but it's so completely my cup of frivolous froth that you might distrust my review. So I'll quickly add that the hero is the sort of blond muscle man I have never found attractive. With tattoos. Isn't biodiversity wonderful--it's good for the species that some women do like that type of man--and all that. I have liked blond men who were skinny and who, if they had any scars, had come by them honestly. Do women's preferences for real-world men ever affect our preferences in romance novels? Don't we always cast our own heroes when visualizing these stories?

Also there's a bit of a cheap trick, where a frazzled nurse blurts out a lot of information about "his" condition, not specifying which patient's privacy she's violating, that prompts a woman to pour out her heart to the "him" behind the curtain...oh, read the book and find out. This is a romantic comedy. 

If you like a romantic comedy with a book-smart heroine who thinks she's been life-stupid--is she right or wrong about that?--you will enjoy Game Set Matchmaker. Like all of these Booktober Blitz books, it is available online, sometimes directly from the author, sometimes on Amazon. This one should be on Amazon some time today. (This review is being written ahead of publication, too.) Writers have reported some schedule/release glitches at Amazon due to the high volume of activity this season, but if you don't find this book at this moment, Sterling has a few other romantic comedies to read while you wait.