Happy Pants Cafe - Book Review

By Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Synopsis

The Happy Pants Café has no public information—no website, no address, no phone number—and it doesn’t show up on any map, either. Yet, there’s a line of single women around the block, waiting to get inside. And when they come out, their smiling faces don’t look like coffee buzzes. (Or afterglows.)

So what could they possibly be doing inside?

Harper Branton thinks she knows their dirty little secret, and it’s just the story to save her mess of a journalistic career. There’s just one problem: her competition. He’s sexy, he’s arrogant, and he’s about turn Harper’s life upside down with a few secrets of his own.

Review

HAPPY PANTS CAFE was an OK read, but at times I found it to be a little too much, like it was trying too hard to be funny. I don’t remember much about Austin or Harper, other than they spent most of the book behaving like children and trying to one-up the other. Harper doesn’t believe in love because Austin broke her heart when she was nine and she’s carried around that thinking for the past nineteen years. Harper broke Austin’s heart when he was eleven, but he still believes in love and marriage and thinks that Harper is the one he’s been waiting for, despite the fact that all they’ve done since they were reunited is fight. Throw in some humour, misunderstandings, meddling friends and potential love rivals, and you have yourself a story that’s cute and quirky, but also cheesy and over-the-top.

There were times I did laugh, but after a while the jokes stopped being funny and instead became silly, or in the case of the sexist farmhands, just plain gross. Sometimes I was distracted by the huge amount of inner monologue in the middle of conversations that, by the time a question was answered, I’d forgotten that a question had even been asked. HAPPY PANTS CAFE is the prequel to the Happy Pants series and is told in dual POVs, with a few sections told in the cafe owner’s POV. Sadly, this one didn’t win me over and ultimately didn’t make me want to read the next book in the series.