Absolutely Almost Perfect by Lissa Reed (August 3. 2017); 256 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.
The third book of Reed’s charming Sucre Couer series, Absolutely Almost Perfect returns to the love story of Alex Scheff, a nervous and acerbic American photographer, and Craig Oliver, a level-headed British ex-pat baker, though this installment leaves behind all the previous settings (the Sucre Couer bakery, Seattle) for the Oliver household in England when Craig brings Alex home to meet his family and celebrate the wedding of his brother.
But things, as they often will do when family is involved, do not go perfectly. (You know this; the title hints at this.) To start with, Alex must deal with meeting the family of his love. Anyone who has done this knows how terrifying it can be—probably more so when visiting that family also means having to navigate a foreign culture. Plus, Craig’s very attractive ex is floating around, still in the family’s good graces, and Alex is going to have to contend with meeting him, too. But wait, there’s more! Craig gets along with all his family (his feisty mother, his steadfast father, even the younger twin girls who, like most teenagers, are, well teenagers) with the glaring exception of his oblivious-to-mean-spirited prankster older brother. They’ve had a contentious, bitter relationship since Craig was born, one that has only gotten worse with time.
To top it all off, there’s a wedding in the mix, with all the stress and family weirdness that tends to bring on.
As I began by saying, the books in this series are charming. The characters—especially, but not only, Alex and Craig—are completely realized and so well-drawn I feel as though I know what they’ll say and do next (I usually don’t, but the feeling itself is significant to me). Craig himself is charming (Alex more closely harmonizes with my taste for the acerbic and sweetly bitter—being a native of the US East Coast will make a person distrustful of the effusiveness or polite restraint preferred in other regions… put that way, I now see that our taste in coffee (strong to the point of bitterness) reflects our social tastes as well).
Great characters aside, what really grabs one about this book is the plot—once I started, I was heroin-level hooked by the drama and urgency of the goings-on. At the heart of this book is love, with dose of reconciliation. Though Alex and Craig are certainly the center of gravity here, it is how a family comes to fit together that matters: anger, jealousy, forgiveness, joy, care and protectiveness all wrap around them and sometimes, as it often is, it’s an ill fit, but it still manages to hold.
Alysia Constantine 